Ahir Shah’s recent Netflix special, Ends, is both a celebration of British multiculturism and a testimony to the sacrifice of his grandparent’s generation, who arrived in the 1960s in search of a better life for their families. Rightly celebrated as a very beautiful act of commemoration – and an unusually positive account of multiculturism, Shah’s special isn’t without teeth. He may be willingly taking on the job of explanation, seeking to educate an audience who are blind to recent British Indian history, but he is not placatory.
Shah’s audience is tacitly framed as liberal but ignorant, as is clear when he lays out the fact that British Indians are ‘by far the largest ethnic minority in this country’, with Hindus as a particularly substantial subset; however, ‘none of you know any of that because our entire cultural output consists of my mate Nish’. The joke smoothes over and somewhat absolves the audience’s ignorance with an affectionate prod at Nish Kumar’s ubiquitousness. This suggests an audience profile that isn’t dominated by British Indians, a profile which may well be particular to the filmed version of the show (at the Royal Court in London). In interview, Shah suggests that the live audience varies considerably. He mentions shows where British Indians were a significant part of the audience, when ‘two, three generations of the same family came’, describing his pride at being able ‘in some small part to reflect that story’. After another show, he describes ‘British Pakistani brothers in their 60s saying… “we remember our dad doing that”‘ (Keaveny 2024). The make-up of the audience thus subtly shifts the dynamic of the show from explanation to shared testimony.
Interestingly, Kumar is just one of the comedians of colour Shah mentions, and we might see his references to others – Ali Al Sayed, Romesh Ranganathan, Jamali Maddix, Hari Kondabolu – as a subtle form of corrective citation. Sara Ahmed describes academic citation as a ‘rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies’ (Ahmed 2013), and Shah is quietly insisting upon a professional and social context that is outwith the dominant – white – groupings.
Shah’s absolution of the audience’s ignorance implies a conciliatory approach, and certainly his style is not confrontational, but there is the occasional sharp poke at liberal complacency and he’s clear that his optimism about British multiculturism is hard won. After describing his parents’ and his grandparents’ arranged marriages, the latter marrying after the exchange of photographs and ‘scant biographical details’, he pauses briefly:
‘It’s so funny talking about this sort of thing to liberal London audiences… you all know that outwardly you have to be like, “Oh, the mysteries of the east, a rich cultural tapestry that may be interwoven with our own” – internally, you’re all just thinking: “that’s fucking barbaric – you’re telling me that two people just out of their teens- all you’ve got to go on is a photograph and a few pieces of scant biographical information, then in a matter of days they’re in bed together [laughter grows as the realisation dawns on the audience what he’s getting at] – that is fucking disgusting”‘.
Shah is smiling broadly by this point, and the complacency of the internal monologue he’s satirising becomes even more pointed, the mocking monotony of his delivery rendering the sentiments tedious and platitudinous: ‘We would never do anything so crass and horrific in our contemporary enlightened Western… ‘ He breaks off to lean over the audience, eyeballing them, driving the point home, and then says: ‘just because you’ve decided to do it via algorithm and not old-woman-in-your-village does not make it less arranged. All that you’ve done is outsource responsibility to the one thing – somehow- less accountable’.
Shah first establishes the more ‘correct’ liberal attitude (‘the mysteries of the east, a rich cultural tapestry’), lightly registering it as a ‘reductive and caricatured version of difference’ (Saha 2013), and then, instead of the expected elucidation or defence of arranged marriages – he moves to an outright attack on Western norms, re-iterating the stereotyped binary of barbaric East vs enlightened West only to upend it, so that the scorn is no longer directed at the Eastern model but instead at the Western position. It may be a false equivalence between a lifetime’s commitment and one sexual encounter – but the point about misplaced Western self-regard still stands.
In these various ways, then, Shah is subtly subversive. And alongside the corrective citation and the satirical jabs at liberal complacency, there’s also his willingness to be entirely serious for long stretches. In these moments he ignores the demand for comedy to be ‘socially lubricating’ (Berlant and Ngai), and instead risks humourlessness, all in the service of his plea for people of colour to have the chance to be ‘normal’, to ‘get to go without saying’, and thus to share in the privileges that white people take for granted.
Works cited:
Ahmed, Sara (2013), https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
Berlant, Lauren and Sianne Ngai (2017), ‘Comedy Has Issues’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 43. no.2, pp.305-340
Keaveny, Shaun (2024), Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind: ‘Ahir Shah: Reasons for Optimism’, Episode 238, 17th September 2024, https://dailygrind.show/episode/ahir-shah-reasons-for-optimism
Saha, Anamik (2013). ‘Curry Tales’: The production of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the cultural industries. Ethnicities, 13(6), pp. 818-837.
Humour in the Arts 