Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ahir Shah: Ends’ On Netflix, Justifying The Means Of His Grandfather’s Generational Sacrifice

Last year’s winner for the Best Show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival finally films his hour for Netflix. Do Ahir Shah’s references to Rishi Sunak mean more or less now, seeing as Sunak and the Tories got swept out of British Parliament since Shah filmed it? Would you believe both?

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The Gist: Speaking of the Fringe, Shah’s Ends joins a growing list of Fringe winners and shortlisted nominees who’ve seen their hours picked up by streamers and filmed for posterity. Rose Matafeo’s Horndog (2018) went to Max; the year before Matafeo’s win witnessed the emergence of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette ; and the year before Gadsby won Edinburgh’s top prize, it went to a fella named Richard Gadd (whose Monkey See Monkey Do recounted the horrifying trauma and repercussions of which he dealt with before meeting the stalker who inspired Baby Reindeer ).

The Fringe also has given birth to recent specials on HBO and Netflix such as the Emmy-winning Alex Edelman: Just For Us , Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?! , Cat Cohen: The Twist? … She’s Gorgeous , London Hughes: To Catch A D*ck , the shows of James Acaster’s Repertoire , and Bo Burnham: Words Words Words . For Shah’s award-winning hour, he dug deep into his family history to draw parallels and contrasts with the rise of Indians out of British colonial rule to eventually ruling Britain.

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Shah’s previous hour, Dots , debuted in 2021 as a special on Max.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Several British comedians of Indian or South Asian descent have stepped forward in recent years, but Shah’s approach to cultural comedy observations shares a bit more with an American comedian he shouted out during the hour: Hari Kondabolu .

Memorable Jokes: Shah’s opening recounts his comedian origin story, watching the first episode of a new BBC sketch comedy series in 1998 that starred British Indian actors, making his grandparents laugh and inspiring a 7-year-old Ahir to do comedy himself. “The boy thought; Wait, we can do that?!” he recalled. Goodness Gracious Me , indeed.

But it was a later gig as a young adult in which Shah realized why some audiences might remember his name, learning from an Arabic comedian that in Arabic, Ahir Shah roughly translates to “prostitute king.”

That might make for awkward exchanges and glances whenever Shah travels to the Middle East, but he says it wasn’t quite as awkward as the time a Jewish comedian got added at the last minute to a lineup of British Asians, only to open his set by asking whom in the crowd of 1,500 had divorced parents. Of course, for Indian and South Asian culture, arranged marriage remains quite customary, and Shah wryly notes how we’re somehow all now judging potential mates based purely on a photograph thanks to dating apps and their algorithms. For Shah himself, he got married in October, and relates how he asked his wife to marry him not long after they’d begun dating (although their actual courtship may have lasted longer than anticipated thanks to the peculiarities of landlords and leases).

That seems somehow…normal?

And that’s what Shah seeks, for himself and for other British Indians. In a way, Sunak becoming the UK’s prime minister in 2022 felt emblematic, even if his win on Diwali made it a difficult day for British Indian men Sunak’s age or younger on WhatsApp, where all of their families and particularly their parents were judging them in comparison to the new PM.

Our Take: Filmed in March, Shah said he was worried about making too many jokes at Sunak’s expense, not because he knew that Sunak would get booted in July’s general elections, but because Shah joked that a decade from now, he might audition to play Sunak in a Channel 4 drama. “I’m not going to burn a bridge before I’ve even crossed it, are you kidding me?”

But the larger message Shah wishes to impart might be more historical than humorous. He ties the loose ends from Sunak all the way back to a British massacre in a small town that included bombs dropped on a school, where one of the surviving students would become Sunak’s grandfather. “A punchline would feel distasteful,” Shah says.

He also pulls at the ties that bound British women together, remarking at the success in the late 1970s of Margaret Thatcher, and how enough women have served as PM in the UK that they’re now allowed to be mediocre or worse. That kind of progress matters. Representation matters. No matter their particular politics, Shah argues. “You don’t need to agree with someone’s politics in order to acknowledge that someone walking through the door means something in and of itself. And that’s the only way that you pave the pathway for others to follow. Right? And you cannot deny that it works.”

All of which leads Shah back to the loose ends from his own ancestors, thinking anew of the “generational sacrifices” made by his grandparents. His grandfather working the most stereotypical British jobs and sharing one room in shifts with two others, so they all could save money to send back to India. Shah’s mother arriving at Heathrow five years later, not recognizing her crying father greeting her to England.

It all puts his childhood traumas in stark perspective to the persecution they felt at the hands of racist Brits, and Shah laments that his elders didn’t live long enough to see Sunak’s elevation, or even Sadiq Khan’s 2016 mayoral election win in London. That Shah’s wife is white and Irish makes Shah feel both more normal and more different on the streets today. His wife handles the dirty looks and comments much better than he does, and he admits she can get by a lot easier by not being on social media.

So she might not even see this review.

“What is the point?” Shah wonders. “If the point is anything, the point is to create a society in which one day everyone’s children get to go without saying.” There is dead silence in the room. “I think you have to be staggeringly naive to believe that that’s possible. And I refuse to be anything else.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Shah hopes to measure up not so much to Sunak or any British politician as he does his grandfather. And by that tale of the tape, he is already proving himself to be the best of men. The end credits include a tribute to the late Adam Brace. If it helps your decision-making, know that Shah’s show was initially directed by Brace, who also developed and directed Alex Edelman’s Just For Us from Edinburgh to Broadway to HBO and an Emmy nomination.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First .

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