With impeccable comic timing Ben Elton's West End run opened on the day that Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was going to unleash AI to boost UK growth. The veteran stand-up's show Authentic Stupidity, which takes Artificial Intelligence as its starting point, is suddenly scorchingly topical as well as bracingly funny.
The nimble 65-year-old is not too anxious about robots destroying humanity though. His satirical thesis is that "homo halfwit" is doing a pretty good job of that without help from marauding jumped-up laptops. In his high velocity, gag-packed set he charts the various ways in which the world has latterly lost the plot.
