Ahir Shah and the mysterious case of his fake mum and dad
Ahir Shah has revealed a trick for getting into his shows if they're sold out ... pretend to be his parents.
The 2023 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner was in Leicester a few years ago when a British-Indian woman he'd never met before came up, pressed £20 into his hand and said: "This is for you."
"She properly thrust it into my hand with a heavy handshake, £20!" he told Vogue Williams on her Never Live It Down podcast.
"And I was like, 'what? What do you mean?' the comic recalled.
It transpired that the woman and her husband had hoped to see Shah at the Leicester Comedy Festival the previous year but were told it was completely sold out, that "there was no room".
Pointing at themselves, the woman had then brazenly replied: "What, not even for his mum and his dad?"
At which point the box office apologised and found them some free seats.
Obviously feeling guilty, the woman was paying up a year later.
However, there's a "very large Indian community in Leicester," Shah reflected. "I've got family in Leicester. And quite often, particularly when I was younger and doing the Leicester Comedy Festival, my parents would come up as well.
"So they were really playing with fire because there was a chance my actual parents would have been there!"