There may be times while you’re watching Ahir Shah’s Ends – winner of the 2023 Best Comedy Show at the Fringe and now airing on Netflix – when you feel you are witnessing the future of British stand-up comedy Shah, 33, is modesty incarnate when I talk in such grand terms. When I suggest he is changing the world, he replies “I don’t doubt that people going on speaking tours by train can change the world, but that’s more Gandhi and Nehru and less ‘Ahir Shah worrying whether he’ll make the 21:54 from Poole if the interval overruns’”.
Not taking himself too seriously is a boon. Still, he’s underselling himself. Ends packs in a mind-expanding amount. In the show, he pays tribute to the sacrifices of his maternal grandfather “nanaji” (Krishnadas Vaishnaw), who came from Gujarat, India to England in 1964 to build a new life. Raised in Wembley, he contrasts his own situation and the impending responsibilities of married life – he got married to an Irish civil servant last October – to what his forebear, toiling in menial jobs and sending money home, went through; and, allied to that, extols the transformation of Britain since those discriminatory days.
But Ends also, daringly, bears a tribute to Rishi Sunak too; the centre-left comic offered praise where he felt it was due to Sunak’s history-making rise to become Britain’s first Asian and Hindu PM.
“Politically, I’m furious – racially, I’m thrilled” he quips, elaborately hailing Sunak for becoming PM “of the very country that colonised and expropriated the wealth of his ancestors, thereby leading to complex migratory patterns – in his family’s case, via East Africa – that eventually landed him on the front doorstep of the most significant address in this country, on the most significant religious day of his faith [Diwali]”. He even acknowledges Margaret Thatcher’s equivalent, game-changing blow for women.
‘Has Sunak seen the show?’, I inquire. “He hasn’t,” comes the reply, “but I know that some people who worked for him in Number 10 did come to see it because they’d heard there was a bit about him. I genuinely hope he watches it on Netflix and that he broadly likes it.”
He viewed Sunak’s finally uncontested nomination as party leader with awe. “I grew up believing that such a thing would never happen. I remember being glued to the news the whole day [October 24, 2022], thinking “When are they going to give it to Penny Mordaunt?”.
Though he hasn’t mourned Sunak’s removal from Downing Street, Shah, as endearingly intense (and highly well-spoken) in person as he is on-stage, does lament one unrealised policy initiative: “It’s a shame – I think taking Maths to 18 would be brilliant, but it wasn’t explained how that was going to happen.”
It’s no surprise, really, to learn of those geekish inclinations. In his set, he does a riff of praise about the money-saving expert Martin Lewis, and his replies often carry a whiff of the statistician. It’s one reason why he remains wedded to the underlying positive thrust of his show, about multi-cultural Britain having moved on in cohesive leaps and bounds since the days of Enoch Powell, whose “Rivers of Blood” speech preceded his mother’s coming to England from India as a child.
The recent riots didn’t cause him to rewrite his set, which he’s taking out on the road early next year. “I said to a friend I would be more worried if I thought [the riots were] in any way genuinely reflective of the country that I live in. I feel optimistic. I know that I’m experiencing adult life in a very different country to the one my mother – and grandparents – experienced adult life in.”
From his own direct experience, too, he has reasons to be upbeat. “There have been instances when people have done racist heckles and there has never been an occasion when people in the room agreed – it was like the rest of the audience went “We’re on his side, not yours”.”
Shah started in stand-up young, going on a comedy course while at the age of 15 and attempting his first try-out spot soon after. His father would take him to the comedy clubs – “It was like this odd hobby. There was no duty of care!” he scoffs, when I ask about any extra safeguards that might have been in place at the time.
He consolidated his craft at Cambridge, where he studied PPS (Politics, Psychology and Sociology) at Clare College, chosen partly because “they had one of the largest intakes of people from state schools”. He joined Footlights and embarked on his first Edinburgh solo show a year before graduation.
Ever since, Shah has been gathering attention for boundary-pushing shows – gaining praise for combining sweetness and light with ambitious, and difficult, subject-matter. In his fifth solo show Machines (2016) he referred to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris; he was performing near Café Bonne Bière, one of the attack sites. “We were ordered out by armed police,” he says now, not wishing to be much drawn into reliving the evident nightmare. “I would have liked not knowing what gunfire actually sounds like.”
Meanwhile Dots (2019) came in the wake of a relationship break-up and a breakdown, and broached his use of anti-depressants. “There was a long time during which, for me, they were deeply necessary,” he tells me, stating he hasn’t needed them for two years.
Ends may evidence an inclination to earnestness, but that’s offset by an abstention from finger-wagging. “An hour of being hectored isn’t fun,” he says. “And I don’t think that it’s particularly fun to get your biases confirmed the whole time. It’s interesting to hear other viewpoints as well.” He weighs his answers before he speaks. When I refer to his being indirectly a victim of colonialism, he counters: “The guys who were killed at Peterloo didn’t look like me, but they’re still victims of the society they lived in”.
Though Shah voted Remain he won’t idealise the EU: “There’s a larger problem with the Far Right on continental Europe than there is in the UK. The idea that British tolerance, inclusivity and diversity were inextricably linked to our membership of the EU is nonsense.” And while he may fret in his set about the country being “on its knees”, returning to the subject of depression, he adds: “Saying “Everything’s going to be awful” is a national trait but the times I’ve said “Nothing’s going to get better” have not made me good company, or been good for me. There’s nothing inevitable about progress, nor anything inevitable about decline.”
Whatever comes next – and Shah has no immediate plans to divulge – it’s clear he has found his métier and that his curiosity about his life, his heritage and the wider world offers a stimulating path forward. “The history of this country is evidenced every time I open my mouth,” he says. “A very specific set of historical circumstances occurred that brought a guy who looks like this and sounds like this to having this conversation. A great amount of that was contingent upon the decisions of a few members of my family but there’s also a grand sweep of history behind it. And knowing about that is cool, right?”
Ahir Shah: Ends is at Soho Theatre, London, W1 (sohotheatre.com), Sept 24 to 28, then tours (ahirshah.com); Ends streams on Netflix from Sept 10
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