Standup is his passion
Covid-19 delayed Ben Elton’s tour for a year, but the British comedian is desperate to get back on stage. reports.
Sharing plates are done. The housing market is screwed. Millennials have been locked out of communal wealth. We’ll be dealing with the aftermath of aworldwide pandemic for years.
‘‘Someone could sneeze in Tasmania,’’ says Ben Elton, ‘‘and the borders get closed.’’
Nothing about the past 12 months seems worth laughing about.
But, when Elton takes to the stage in Blenheim tomorrow night, the first date of the British comic’s massive standup comedy tour around New Zealand, he won’t avoid any of the elephants in the room.
Yes, there’ll be jokes about Covid-19 – and plenty of other stuff, too.
‘‘There’s no subject on Earth we’re not ready to laugh about,’’ says Elton, his British accent refusing to quit despite calling Australia home for more than a decade.
‘‘I remember being asked in the 80s: ‘Would you make jokes about Aids?’ I said, ‘Of course I would – but it depends on the joke’. No subject is out of bounds, but some attitudes are out of bounds.
‘‘If the joke is brutal, if it’s bullying, if it’s punching down or exploiting other people’s weaknesses, then it’s not even a good joke, let alone being morally a good thing.
‘‘I feel exactly the same as I did in the 80s.’’ Welcome to the wonderful world of Elton, a warm, funny and scattershot interview subject who takes mere seconds to warm up on the phone from his home in Perth.
Across our half-hour interview, he treats topics as excuses for cramming in as many tangents, riffs, references, rants, quotes, side-notes and bullet points as he possibly can.
Sometimes, he fires words at me so fast it’s like he’s aworld War II tailgunner taking aim from a turret.
When asked if he misses live shows, Elton
Will Rock You,