COMEDIAN Ben Elton is to visit Basingstoke's The Anvil with his new show, Authentic Stupidity.

This tour comes five years after Elton's previous successful UK trip in 2019, his comeback after a 15-year gap.

He first gained national attention in the 1980s, with Channel 4’s Saturday Live.

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The Anvil event will be on Sunday, September 22, starting at 7.30pm; tickets are currently going fast, with few seats remaining.

Elton said: "The tour title is a little joke about how we’re all saying that Artificial Intelligence is this great threat to humanity, which of course it is, but I reckon the biggest threat is actually Authentic Stupidity!

"Never mind AI, let’s start by worrying about AS! But really all my tours could have been called Authentic Stupidity! because they’re always comic explorations of the essential absurdity of existence. I think all good comedy is.

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"In some ways, the world is better now. I think younger people have started to accept that weakness is OK; that weakness is merely an acknowledgement that you might need help, that you aren’t necessarily the thing you want to be or that people expect you to be. All these things that we used to hide are coming out more.

"And now we’ve invented AI, I mean how stupid is that? If a terrorist went on television and said, ‘We’ve come up with a machine that will literally make human beings redundant' we’d send in MI5! We’d think this is a genuinely existential threat to the future of humanity. But because this is a bunch of tech bros and billionaires in California, we’re all just going, ‘Oh well, apparently it’s going to be able to write new Beatles songs'."

Tickets cost £36.50, including a £4 booking fee. For enquires or purchases, contact the Anvil Arts box office at 01256 844244 or visit its website.