Interview: Ahir Shah

In Control (Best Show nominee – Edinburgh Comedy Awards), acclaimed comic Ahir Shah explores the current global sociopolitical turmoil in a show about freedom, fascism, history, hope, and resistance.

Ahir’s last show Machines enjoyed packed runs at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Soho Theatre, and a national tour. In that show, he theorised that we were being tugged in contradictory directions by a potential brighter future and the resurgent worst of the past. He’s currently trying to work out what the future now looks like in a time when the past appears to be winning.

“A call to arms against political complacency” – The Guardian
“Fiendishly clever and furious” – The Times

“A call to arms against political complacency”. Is that the main thrust of the show?
I feel as though a lot of the language used to explain contemporary phenomena in Western politics – talk of those left behind by globalisation, those with legitimate concerns™ about immigration – serves to obfuscate an oftentimes dangerous underlying antipathy to diversity and equality, and a worrying blowback against the relatively recent extension of actual humanity towards previously dehumanised groups. To that degree, I guess the show is an attempt to rouse people out of complacent complicity.
It’s also so, so much funnier than I am currently making it sound.

How much do you hope to make your audiences a) laugh and b) think about where we are as a society?
I want to do one of these things 72.4% of the time and the other 27.6% of the time. I won’t tell you figure corresponds to which aim.

“The past appears to be winning.” How so?
The ascendancy of nostalgia is all around us. I think it’s evident in the global success of campaigns that have played to a gross, fetishised approximation of the (largely fictitious) “good old days”. Good for who, anyway? “Ah, I miss the good old days, when you could leave your front door unlocked, and everyone had polio.”

Does the show (do you) take a broadly pessimistic or optimistic view of the state we’re in?
I’m broadly pessimistic. Having said that, I recently turned 27, so within the next few months I’m going to be busy myself revolutionising my art form and/or dying. Then I can peacefully check out, blissfully unaware as the sea levels rise and the bombs fall.

You’ve called the show Control. Control by whom, of what?
That’s a question I wish someone had asked the Leave campaign. The honest answer would be quite frightening.

What led you into this particular brand of political comedy? Were you always a keen observer of news and current affairs as a teenager, for example?
I’ve always been a bit of a politics nerd (in addition to several other types of nerd), and being able to air my thoughts, fears and opinions through comedy seemed better than yelling them at bus stops in the dead of night.

Do more problematic times like these make richer fodder for a political comedian?
Almost certainly. It’s terrible and I wish it weren’t happening.

Ahir Shah performs Control at the Comedy Box at the Hen & Chicken on Feb 23. For more info, visit www.thecomedybox.co.uk/site/301.asp?catID=1614&ct=date