Comedian Ahir Shah interview: ‘I’m pretty sure at one stage pre-pandemic I got scurvy’
Stand-up comedian and University of Cambridge graduate Ahir Shah’s new show, Dress, looks at, among other things, significance, insignificance and scurvy, a disease he suffered from during lockdown – well, kind of...
Known for his blend of observational philosophical inquiry and personal examination, politics also finds its way into Ahir Shah’s comedy on occasion – hardly surprising since he studied politics, psychology and sociology at Clare College (though he believes it’s now called human, social, and political sciences).
“It [politics] has been an inescapable part of life over the course of the last year,” says Ahir, who started doing comedy gigs around London while still at school, encouraged by his father. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘big P’ political comedian but certainly there are a limited amount of other things that you can be when the national airwaves at 5pm are taken over each day by the Prime Minister.”
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent, Ahir appears to be feeling quite reflective. “Over the last few months, there’s been a thing of, ‘Right, we’re able to go and do stand-up again’, which is amazing,” he says, “and then the world moves so quickly now that between the time that I stopped the tour for a break over Christmas and I’m going to be starting it up again at the end of the month, we’ve gone through an entirely new variant of coronavirus – so it’s a difficult one to keep up with.”
Unsurprisingly, Ahir, 31, missed performing live over the whole lockdown period. “It’s an odd situation being effectively told by the government on the television that A, the thing that you love and B, your profession is a gigantic public health risk and so can’t happen at that point,” he says. “I think that for a lot of us we sort of realised perhaps how much of our identities we tied to certain things.
“Certainly I tied a lot of my identity to the fact that I was a stand-up, and it’s like, ‘Oh well, here you are, in the absence of that you’ve got to work that out again’, but usefully the vaccine roll-out happened successfully enough for me to avoid experiencing too much existential angst about it.”
While some comics are back touring their previously cancelled pre-pandemic shows, Ahir’s Dress is a new piece which deals directly with the events of the past two years. “Dress is very much a chronicle of that period of time where nothing and everything happened,” he explains.
“And looking at it through the frame of the things that changed in all of our lives, and the things that changed in my life specifically that I wanted to discuss. It’s just a thing that brings together, as I said before, everything from the point where stand-up stopped up to the point where it started again.”
On the mention of ‘significance, insignificance and scurvy’ in the description of Dress, Ahir, who has appeared on TV programmes such as Mock the Week, Live At the Apollo, Have I Got News for You, and The Mash Report, says: “I think that the last couple of years have given everyone a lot of time to think about what is and isn’t significant in the world and for them, and there’s no way of sugar-coating it but I’m pretty sure that at one stage pre-pandemic I got scurvy for a little bit.
“It turns out that if you don’t consume any sort of citrus fruit or anything like that, it genuinely can happen. This wasn’t even at a time that I’d taken an interest in international naval piracy...”
Ahir’s condition was self-diagnosed and he observes: “When the symptoms are the symptoms of scurvy and it all goes away when you start drinking orange juice, I don’t think of myself as much of a diagnostician but I’m pretty confident – but I don’t think that that took, like, Dr House to work out.”
The comedian says it’s always nice to come back to Cambridge. “It is. It’s very odd how it’s changed over time, because certainly in my early 20s whenever I would come back... well, I suppose the fact that I still refer to it as coming back shows something.
“But yes, in my early 20s it would always be like, ‘I’m going to my university town to do a gig’, whereas now it’s more like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work in a place where I happened to be at university’ and I think that this just shows the inexorable march of time.”
Does Ahir, who expresses great affection for the BBC comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me – which he enjoyed watching with his family while growing up – return to any old haunts whenever he’s here? “I wish that I was in any way organised enough to be able to do that,” he laughs, “and not simply be like, ‘Oh, no I need to really peg it from Cambridge station to the Junction otherwise I’m screwed!’”
A double Edinburgh Comedy Award ‘Best Show’ nominee, Ahir has performed in various countries around the world including a tour of India, as well as runs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Adelaide Fringe and the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
He will be appearing at the Junction’s J2 on Saturday, January 29. Visit junction.co.uk. For more on Ahir, go to ahirshah.com.
Read more
Review: Jason Manford at the Cambridge Corn Exchange
