Among past winners of the Edinburgh comedy award, few seemed less likely when the starter’s pistol fired than Ahir Shah in 2023. Not because Shah wasn’t a contender: he had been nominated twice before. But that year he arrived on the fringe with a mere work-in-progress, not even eligible for the award. Shah’s director, the great Adam Brace, had recently died and the comic had just returned to the stage after a break from comedy. But then Ends, a tribute to the performer’s late grandfather and a hymn to multicultural Britain, began gathering steam. Shah reclassified it as a work-now-finished and, to a chorus of rapturous acclaim, it bagged the biggest prize in world comedy.
Three years on, he is returning with the follow-up: less uncut diamond this time and more, he hopes, a polished gem. But didn’t the success of Ends prove polish was unnecessary? “You can get very in your head approaching the fringe, thinking: ‘Well, it has to be absolutely locked in by August because x thousand pounds are on the line,’” Shah admits. So doing a work-in-progress allowed him to “quiet some of those voices – and have less of a panic attack about what you’re going to say”.
Notwithstanding his patrician accent (he once joked that he sounds as if “I’ve been colonised by my own voice”), Shah is no stranger to low confidence. His approach to standup is to ask: “How are you justifying breaking the silence that exists in this room prior to you walking out?” With Ends, the justification was ample. Like all the Londoner’s work, the show teemed with ideas and erudition, this time at the service of a tale (as Shah now describes it) of “the sacrifices people are willing to make in their own lives for subsequent generations. It was about what families do for one another.”
But the show, pulled together as Rishi Sunak became prime minister, was also about the UK, and how it had changed since Shah’s grandfather moved here in the 1960s. “I couldn’t help but think about the incomprehensible shift that had to occur over 60 years to make something my grandfather could never have conceived of come to pass.” The UK, Shah declared in the show, is “the least racist country in the world”: not an argument audiences expected from a regular guest on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and a comic once known for firebrand lefty polemic.
“I completely understand the temptation to do the whole ‘rainy fascism island’ thing,” he says. “I’ve succumbed to it many a time. But for most of my adult life, we’ve reflexively told only very sad and bad stories about ourselves. And you can only go on like that for so long. As an individual, you can lie in bed saying: ‘I’m the worst person who ever existed. This is all pointless.’ You can do that – and, by God, I’ve given it a good go. But it’s no way to lead a fulfilling, three-dimensional life. As a collective, we need positive stories as well.”
That positivity helped secure a stellar future for Ends, which toured the world (including India, “which was really emotionally significant”) and was broadcast on Netflix. And so the dreams came true for a comic who cut his standup teeth aged 17. Golden, his new set, is inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem and “section 341 of The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche”. It finds Shah on the threshold of middle-age, now married, planning a family, spooked by the looming responsibility.
“These are the issues of capital-G grownup life. All of a sudden there is someone more important than you sharing your roof. There are people who all this matters for. There are obligations that are going to bear down on you again and again. And there’s a voice saying: ‘What if you can’t do it? What if you’re not good enough?’”
This time with reference to his mother’s life story, Shah is confronting those demons in a show that takes its title from Hopkins’ verse The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. “The leaden echo,” says the comic, “is the inevitability of decay. I call it in the show the cold, repetitive, mechanistic, obligatory forevers that every adult in our society is subject to, my mother more than most. And if that’s what encases you in lead, then how do you get golden?”
It’s a fine question to be asking for someone who got gold on his last full fringe visit, and is recalibrating his ambitions in light of that success. The Edinburgh comedy award, he says, “was what I dreamed of winning when I started out. I did that. Let’s see what happens now.” One thing he won’t be doing is diluting his highbrow tastes in pursuit of a mainstream audience. “I’m not Mr Saturday Night, I’m not that guy,” he says cheerfully. “An infrastructure exists around comedians that encourages you to underestimate audiences. But I don’t accept that. As long as you build your work out of jokes, what you build is up to you. And what could be more freeing, more wonderful than that?”
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Ahir Shah: Golden is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Then touring from 5 October to 14 March
