If you were to judge Ahir Shah’s Netflix comedy special Ends by its trailer – a middle-of-the-road motormouth anecdote of a comedian from the United Arab Emiratesexplaining the meaning of Shah’s name in Arabic – you might just pass on what is one of the most enthralling standup hours in recent memory.
Ends had a rocky beginning. It arrived at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2023 as a self-declared work-in-progress and was performed in a small, poorly ventilated basement venue. The lack of preparation was due to the sudden passing of the show’s director, Adam Brace (to whom the special is dedicated).
As a work-in-progress show, Ends was ineligible for any awards at the festival. Apparently no one informed the judges. It went on to win best comedy – the grandest of honours in the comedy world – and returned to Edinburgh this August for a victory lap, ahead of a UK tour.
Ends begins with somewhat humdrum material to get the audience onboard. It’s funny enough, but nothing to write home about: tales of Shah watching BBC’s sketch comedy series Goodness Gracious Me with his grandparents; his teenage dream of becoming GQ’s “World’s Best Dressed Man”; and standard fare about generational differences.
But just as the show seems to be plodding along amusingly yet forgettably, the rug is swept from under viewers’ feet as Shah dives head-first into tackling racism, classism and the hardships of immigration. It’s a show that provokes tears of laughter, frustration and despair – and transmits hope for the future and humanity, as naive as Shah admits that may be.
Ends is the story of Shah’s grandfather’s (or nānājī’s) self-sacrifice for his family, and how the world Shah now lives in would seem unfathomably utopian to the man who first set foot on British shores in the 1960s. With a catastrophic economy and apocalyptic violence in India, nānājī’s wife (Shah’s nanima) asked him to emigrate to England and earn enough money that she and their three children could join him. It took more than five years, with communication almost impossible and his wife having only a photograph and a few letters to remember him by and cry herself to sleep over.
Shah is a left-leaning comedian, and the rise of Rishi Sunak to the highest level of office in Britain (the special was filmed at London’s Royal Court Theatre in March, before the election where Sunak was ousted as prime minister) left him at an awkward crossroads: “Politically, I’m furious,” he laments. “Racially, thrilled.”
Through an amalgam of anger and aspiration, he darts between difficult subjects, including the atrocities of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre and what followed; the unheralded success of multiculturalism and (literal) gender politics in Britain compared its European counterparts; and Shah’s bewilderment about his nānājī’ bringing his family to England in the wake of the racism-fuelled Smethwick election campaign of 1964 and Enoch Powell’s infamous, anti-immigrant Rivers of Blood speech in 1968.
Shah seamlessly breaks up heartfelt material with more playful fare, be it the expectations of Indian parents (“Sunak never made his school cricket team, I was captain of mine”); avoiding a mugging due to taking an optional Latin class held by his favourite teacher; or his adoration for Ottolenghi cookbooks.
He’s also not afraid to break the tension by delivering the cheapest of gags about the number 69 – with a cheeky grin of acknowledgment for his audacity.
But it’s the final 20 minutes of this powerhouse performance that make it truly spell-binding. The juxtaposition of both Shah and his nanima’s love for their partners on their wedding days makes for one of most tear-jerking monologues I’ve witnessed. Similarly moving are Shah’s tales of his nānājī eating the dirt of his beloved homeland on return trips to India, and literally working himself to death for his family; and Shah wondering if his nānājī heard the final words his daughter said before he flatlined in a hospital bed in 2002.
Ends is a luminous, hilarious and equally heartbreaking/heartwarming piece of comedy.
Goodness gracious me, indeed. How proud his nānājī – Krishnadas Vaishnaw – would be.