{"id":743696,"date":"2026-08-20T05:02:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/743696\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T05:02:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:02:17","slug":"im-not-mr-saturday-night-the-highbrow-brilliance-of-ahir-shah-past-winner-of-comedys-top-prize-ahir-shah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/743696\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m not Mr Saturday Night\u2019: the highbrow brilliance of Ahir Shah, past winner of comedy\u2019s top prize | Ahir Shah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among past winners of the Edinburgh comedy award, few seemed less likely when the starter\u2019s pistol fired than Ahir Shah in 2023<\/a>. Not because Shah wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s director, the great Adam Brace<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, it bagged the biggest prize in world comedy.<\/p>\n

Three years on, he is returning with the follow-up: less uncut diamond this time and more, he hopes, a polished gem. But didn\u2019t the success of Ends prove polish was unnecessary? \u201cYou can get very in your head approaching the fringe, thinking: \u2018Well, it has to be absolutely locked in by August because x thousand pounds are on the line,\u2019\u201d Shah admits. So doing a work in progress allowed him to \u201cquiet some of those voices \u2013 and have less of a panic attack about what you\u2019re going to say\u201d.<\/p>\n

double quotation markBy God, I\u2019ve lain in bed thinking I\u2019m the worst person who ever existed<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding his patrician accent (he once joked that he sounds as if \u201cI\u2019ve been colonised by my own voice\u201d), Shah is no stranger to low confidence. His approach to standup is to ask: \u201cHow are you justifying breaking the silence that exists in this room prior to you walking out?\u201d With Ends, the justification was ample. Like all the Londoner\u2019s work, the show teemed with ideas and erudition, this time at the service of a tale (as Shah now describes it) of \u201cthe sacrifices people are willing to make in their own lives for subsequent generations. It was about what families do for one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the show, pulled together as Rishi Sunak became prime minister, was also about the UK, and how it had changed since Shah\u2019s grandfather moved here in the 1960s. \u201cI couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d The UK, Shah declared in the show, is \u201cthe least racist country in the world\u201d: not an argument audiences expected from a regular guest on Frankie Boyle<\/a>\u2019s New World Order and a comic once known for firebrand lefty polemic.<\/p>\n

\u2018You can only tell sad and bad stories for so long\u2019 \u2026 Ahir Shah. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cI completely understand the temptation to do the whole \u2018rainy fascism island\u2019 thing,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve succumbed to it many a time. But for most of my adult life, we\u2019ve 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: \u2018I\u2019m the worst person who ever existed. This is all pointless.\u2019 You can do that \u2013 and, by God, I\u2019ve given it a good go. But it\u2019s no way to lead a fulfilling, three-dimensional life. As a collective, we need positive stories as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

That positivity helped secure a stellar future for Ends, which toured the world (including India, \u201cwhich was really emotionally significant\u201d) 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<\/a> poem and \u201csection 341 of The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche\u201d. It finds Shah on the threshold of middle-age, now married, planning a family, spooked by the looming responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese 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\u2019s a voice saying: \u2018What if you can\u2019t do it? What if you\u2019re not good enough?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This time with reference to his mother\u2019s life story, Shah is confronting those demons in a show that takes its title from Hopkins\u2019 verse The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. \u201cThe leaden echo,\u201d says the comic, \u201cis 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\u2019s what encases you in lead, then how do you get golden?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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, \u201cwas what I dreamed of winning when I started out. I did that. Let\u2019s see what happens now.\u201d One thing he won\u2019t be doing is diluting his highbrow tastes in pursuit of a mainstream audience. \u201cI\u2019m not Mr Saturday Night, I\u2019m not that guy,\u201d he says cheerfully. \u201cAn infrastructure exists around comedians that encourages you to underestimate audiences. But I don\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among past winners of the Edinburgh comedy award, few seemed less likely when the starter\u2019s pistol fired than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-743696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}