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. Chris Schulz reports.
I’m coming raw and ready. I don’t feel nervous about being rusty.
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 a worldwide 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 stand-up 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 a World War II tailgunner taking aim from a turret.
When asked if he misses live shows, Elton manages to reference Australia’s ‘‘80,000-year habitation history’’ in a lengthy spiel about the live entertainment industry.
Mention the potential two weeks he’d need to spend in quarantine before his tour (this was well before any trans-Tasman bubbles) and he’ll talk about his exercise routine, his love of beer and Yorkshire pudding, then conclude by calling our internet addictions ‘‘a global social experiment’’.
And, when asked if he worries about cancel culture, Elton replies: ‘‘If I feel like I can justify what I said and I’m coming to it from my own moral truth and that I’m not, in my view, punching down and I’m not exploiting the subject, if someone chooses to misquote me on Twitter I’m not going to be scared by that. I’m just going to do my thing.’’
Put another way, Elton is enjoying his elder statesman role as a comedy godfather.
It’s easy to forget that the 62-year-old and threetime Bafta winner has spent decades amassing a body of work across multiple mediums that’s unlike any other living comic.
He has several iconic TV shows to his name, including Brit-com classics The Young Ones,
Blackadder, The Ben Elton Show and The Thin Blue Line.
Elton has also written 17 novels. Titles like Popcorn and Dead Famous became bestsellers and others were regularly adapted into films or theatre shows.
He has directed two films, Maybe Baby and Three Summers, and written an ode to Shakespeare, All is True. He’s also written multiple theatre productions, including Queen’s We Will Rock You, a hit musical which is still touring – pandemic permitting.
Today, he describes himself, humbly, as ‘‘a writer’’, one who escaped the ravages of Covid-19 in the relative sanity of Perth, where he lives with his wife, the Australian bass player Sophie Gare.
Writing got him through Covid, but stand-up comedy, says Elton, is his true passion.
He can’t wait to get back on stage. ‘‘I work very, very hard on my stand-up routines,’’ he admits. ‘‘It is an art form. I think it’s a great way of communicating ideas in a very specific way.’’
He was supposed to be here doing what he loves, touring New Zealand for the first time in 15 years, exactly this time last year.
So confident were promoters that they booked Elton for a two-day ‘‘pre-tour tour’’ in late February.
He stopped by the Breeze radio studio for a chat with Drive host Robert Scott, and sat on the TVNZ Breakfast couch as Hayley Holt called him a ‘‘legend’’.
‘‘I did two days in Auckland talking about the tour I was just about to start,’’ remembers Elton.
‘‘I got back and literally all hell broke loose the minute I got off the plane.’’
Like everyone else, Elton went home, stayed home. He’s been there for the past year, joined periodically by his three adult children.
Did Elton try out any new comedy routines on his family? Er, no. ‘‘There’s one rule in stand-up comedy,’’ he replies. ‘‘Never, under any circumstances, do your material around the table to your friends and family.’’
You’d think he’d be worried about the lack of stage time. Elton has barely left the house for 12 months. But he says he won’t be rusty.
‘‘I’m coming raw and ready. It’s like riding a bicycle: the brakes might not work and the gears are a bit rusty but I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t feel nervous about being rusty.’’
He thinks time off the road will have done him good.
‘‘You do a routine that was funny a year-anda-half ago and it will be even funnier now because it’s been confronted by a whole new set of circumstances.
‘‘I’m itching for that part of my artistic life to be given back to me, to engage with an audience. I miss it.’’
He landed in New Zealand on Monday, no need for quarantine thanks to that bubble. Ben Elton Live is his biggest tour here yet, and he’s making the most of it, incorporating days off and holidays into his 17 shows. ‘‘I do like a misty mountain,’’ he says.
But when he gets on stage, no topic will be off limits.
If you’re offended? Well, maybe you need to look at the reason why.
‘‘I do deal with all the big subjects of the day,’’ he says. ‘‘My belief is the audience understands I’m doing my best to deal with complicated and difficult social situations.
‘‘You’ll just have to come and see if you get triggered or not.’’