A blazing comic talent firing on all cylinders
Last year, Ahir Shah was nominated for the Fringe’s top comedy award with Control, an hour of blistering political stand-up. He’s on the list again for Duffer, but go in expecting more of the same and you’ll be wrong-footed. That show thrilled the intellect; this one speaks to the heart.
It is in every way a more mature and accomplished outing: intricately crafted, profoundly moving, howlingly funny. Of the 60-plus comedy shows I have seen at this Fringe, it’s the only one that has reduced me to tears.
Duffer is free and unticketed, but the buzz around it means you’ll have to arrive an hour early to queue for a seat. If you’d rather not, two paid dates have been added at the Underbelly. However you see it, make sure you do.
At 27, Shah is no longer last year’s know-it-all firebrand, angrily setting the world to rights. Here he reveals his vulnerable side as he tells us about visiting his beloved Indian grandmother, now on her deathbed, who was deported from the UK when he was five years old. It’s a tale that deftly keeps the personal and the political in balance, strung together by – bizarrely – a joke about the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody.
Like that song, this is a show that adds up to more than its disparate parts. “Dead relative shows” are nothing new. At the Fringe, it’s a genre so common it deserves its own section in the festival programme. The usual trick is to lighten moments of tragedy with throwaway callbacks to earlier jokes. But more than once in this show, Shah does something subtly brilliant: he does the reverse, threading in throwaway heartbreak between biting punchlines. A witty riff on reincarnation includes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to an earlier section about his uncle’s suicide.
Shah can still wield a put-down like a scalpel, but rather than using that talent to tear strips off his political targets, he now performs openheart surgery, dissecting his own convictions. He’s a diehard atheist, but respects his religious Indian relatives’ faith, and rails against his own very secular British world-view. “You’re not a socialist, or a humanist: what you are is one of three flavours of Christian with all the God sucked out – and you wonder why you feel empty.”
His dislike of religion, he admits, is a kind of envy; he wishes he could find the comfort of belief, in a world that leaves him increasingly doubtful and uncertain. That uncertainty is partly a side-effect of having recently come off medication for his depression (“I’m clinically totes emosh”). Shah’s doctor saw his last show and worried that he was having a breakdown, as he admits in one particularly funny anecdote. This year, the Doc needn’t worry. More confident than ever, Shah actually seems to be enjoying himself: he’s a blazing talent firing on all cylinders, and knows it.
On the Free Fringe at Cabaret Voltaire until Aug 26, with extra, paid shows at the Underbelly Aug 24 & 25). Underbelly tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk