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 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.
His stance risks tipping into nostalgic grumpy git terrain but Elton is too self-aware for that. For every droll put-down of Gen Z there are three jokes at his own expense. Yes, kids today might have more metal in their faces than the average junkyard, but it's Elton who has to wear a sleep apnoea mask that makes him resemble a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Dumbo.
We would expect him to be waggish about geriatric indignities, but he was also genuinely touching about his heartfelt belief that medicine kept his ailing parents alive too long. If the co-writer of classic sitcom The Young Ones had his way assisted dying pills would be available in Tesco, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "supermarket checkout".
This leads into one of the strongest set-pieces of the first half, a powerhouse portrait of a final dinner with an elderly relative, where there is a culture clash with a tattoo'd blue-haired hipster waiter and everyone gets served fashionable sharing plates which nobody likes.
