Comedian Ahir Shah Weaves Together the Past, Present, and Future

In 2022, British Asian comedian Ahir Shah’s life was on the precipice of change. He was getting married the next year (for the record, Shah proposed to his now-wife after just five weeks because, as he says in his special, “I get shit done.”) and searched for examples of husbands he could look to as role models.

“I realized that the longest marriage in the history of my family was that between my mother’s parents, who were married just shy of a half century before my grandfather’s death,” Shah tells me over Zoom. “And then I just got thinking about loads of different things between our lives. He arrived in the UK on his own in 1964 when he was slightly younger than I was at the time, but he had a wife and three children who he left in India in order to come here and start things for them. And you know, if you start thinking about, gosh, what a sheer quantity of difference between what this guy experienced and what I’m going to experience, and the inevitable differences that that will put on our visions of marriage and family and these sorts of things.”

Not only that, but Shah also contemplated how much the UK has changed since his maternal grandfather immigrated there, especially because in 2022 Rishi Sunak became the first British Asian prime minister. Shah heartily opposes Sunak’s Conservative politics, but appreciates the progress that’s been made so that Sunak could reach the country’s highest office in the first place—something his grandfather “would never have imagined.” 

For context, the year that Shah’s grandfather arrived in the UK was also the year that Conservative MP Peter Griffiths was elected in Smethwick, campaigning on an infamously racist slogan containing the n-word. Four years later, Conservative politician Enoch Powell declared that allowing immigrants’ children and spouses into the country was “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” And while Sunak may no longer be PM, Shah’s point remains vital: his home has become a more diverse and accepting—though by no means perfect—place.

And so an Edinburgh Fringe show was born, which then became the comedy special Ends, now streaming on Netflix. Shah walks that tricky tightrope of sharing the emotional gravity of his grandfather’s experience—and the immigrant experience at large—while showing off his skills as a stand-up comedian who’s been in the game for 18 years. He’s fast talking and endearing, easily controlling the tension in the room. 

“You inevitably get a sense when you’re telling these stories, and particularly when you get to quite personal stories and whatnot, you get a point where you’re like, Right, this balloon has been blown up and blown up and blown up, and if a bit of air isn’t taken out of the balloon, it’s going to pop. And so that’s when you need the exhalation of the laugh to come from the audience,” he tells me. 

That’s part of why Shah loves stand-up so much: if you build something out of jokes, you can talk about pretty much whatever you like. In this case, he’s exploring 60 years’ worth of his family’s history in 60 minutes. The narrative told in Ends is by no means unique to Shah’s family, though talking about it is fairly uncommon for older generations of Indian immigrants. 

“Lots of this stuff was very intentionally not spoken about, not explored at all, because there was stuff about vulnerability, and vulnerability would mean weakness, and then weakness can be taken advantage of, etc., etc.,” Shah says, noting that this sort of emotional guardedness is “a very natural and rational position to find yourself in.” However, he wants to make sure that these stories, the stories of men like his grandfather, are passed on because before, Shah explains, “There was no one to speak about it on their behalf. There was no one to listen, even if there was someone speaking. And then all of this could conceivably have therefore been lost, and I think that there are probably a lot of families for whom, unfortunately, their stories have been lost because people took a lot of stuff with them to the grave.”

Clearly this is an outlet that first generation immigrants and beyond have been craving; late in 2023 and early in 2024, Shah did an extended run of Ends in London and was surprised to find that people around his age were bringing their own parents and grandparents to his show. 

“I don’t know how many stand up comedians routinely working in the UK have first generation immigrants in their 80s coming to their shows and everything. I can’t imagine that it’s a huge number, but what an honor to perform in front of those people and then get to speak to them afterwards,” Shah tells me. These older audience members had, like his grandfather, sacrificed so much in their youth and beyond in order to give their progeny more. The means to the next generation’s ends. That sacrifice is why Shah wanted to zoom out in his special, giving us perspective and reminding us how far we’ve come. 

“To a certain degree, self deprecation can be a charming national characteristic, and after a while, it can slip into the definition of clinical depression,” Shah remarks, later continuing: “If you don’t acknowledge the reality of what’s happened over the last few decades, then you’ll never acknowledge its fragility, and that’s the way that it gets broken.”

In both his personal life and his comedy, Shah aims to follow a particular line from the Ephebic oath, which young Athenian men swore in order to become citizens and was also a favorite quote of architect Richard Rogers: “I shall leave this city not less but more beautiful than I found it.” 

It’s a noble goal that his grandfather undoubtedly accomplished, and that Shah does, too, with his clear-eyed, deeply stirring, yet still hilarious hour Ends.

Ends is now streaming on Netflix. 

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Go harass her on Twitter @theclaremartin.