Ahir Shah is obviously a very good comedian: his last show, Ends,was famously so good that it came to the 2023 Fringe as a work-in-progress, was rapidly upgraded to finished show and then won that year’s main Comedy Award.
Follow-up Golden is of course very funny, a mediation on getting older and settling down in which Shah mines some sharp, oft-idiosyncratic laughs from buying a flat, getting married, and the amusement that comes from being a total (probably) autistic mess of neuroses and depression and being in a relationship with a woman who is almost comically ‘normal’.
But is it reasonable to say that Shah is moving slightly away from comedy with Golden, a show whose heart lies in impassioned rants about family, mortality, the state of the British state and I guess maybe you could say the meaning of life?
I mean it’s hard to unequivocally say ‘Ahir Shah is aiming to be less funny now’ when it may be that Golden will eventually take on a more amusing final form. But the version I saw was certainly unafraid not to be serious.
This sounds like I’m damning what with faint praise. But for the most part I found the most impassioned moments – including a new ending he wrote shortly before the run started, for reasons you’ll discover – absolutely sublime. Some of this stuff is in terms of subject matter not a million miles away from Peter Kay. But while Kay’s musings on family etcetera are, ah, what they are, Shah’s anguished, erudite screeds are utterly hypnotic - again and again I expected a bathetic punchline to punctuate his passion and again and again he had the courage to just let it land without any lols.
It’s not Bill Hicks-style performative philosopher-poet stuff - more a very smart man trying to say what’s in his heart and experimenting with earnestness as a medium alongside the gags. It’s unlikely to have the same success as the more rounded Ends and there will be those slightly bemused by it, but I found Shah’s existential grappling electrifying.
