Ahir Shah made his name – and secured a 2017 Edinburgh comedy award nomination – with polemical standup about the disintegrating state of the world. This year’s set, Duffer, tries something different. It’s about his grandmother, who was deported from the UK – and from Shah’s family home – when he was five, and whom he met for the first time in 22 years on a recent trip to Gujarat. It’s a show with lots to recommend it, even if Shah’s style probably lends itself better to political than emotional comedy.
There is a political dimension to Duffer, mind you: Shah uses his gran’s enforced exile from Britain to make strident points about immigration policy. But mainly this is a personal set, about his ethnicity – there’s a gleeful opening routine about British Indians’ secret success (“Jews are taking a lot of our heat!”) – his struggles with depression, and the tug on this atheist millennial of his ancestral religion.
The title derives from the Hindi word for fool or clown: his gran’s pet name for him as an infant. After she is deported, and an uncle kills himself, Shah recounts his difficulties coping with both his personal life and the overwhelming negativity of the daily news. Things get grimmer when a standup tour takes him to India, where his grandmother’s poor health forces him to consider euthanasia.
At times, I doubted whether Shah really finds much humour in these subjects. You can hardly blame him, but the jokes – often excellent on paper – aren’t animated by much spirit of fun. His political diatribes, and some poetic philosophising, feel like they are where his heart lies – even if they generate silence or applause rather than laughter.
But there remains much to enjoy, or be impressed by, in Duffer. A staged dialogue between Shah and religion drolly itemises the consolations of blind faith. There’s a running joke about Bohemian Rhapsody that keeps on giving. You can’t help but admire the volume of difficult material Shah unfolds here – about race, mental health, mortality – even if its transformation into comedy is, by his own high standards, imperfectly realised.
- At Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
• This article was amended on 14 August 2018 because an earlier version said Ahir Shah was performing at Edinburgh’s Laughing Horse. Shah’s show is at Cabaret Voltaire.
