Ahir Shah is in limbo. As a recent Cambridge graduate now braving the world of professional stand-up, he precariously straddles the student and “real” world. His tone is both warmly familiar (he opens with exam-related small-talk), yet also anxiously aware of his need to sell himself: comedy is now no joke. Which isn’t to say Shah doesn’t make light of his newly professionalised stand-up status: 'GIVE ME YOUR MONEY AND I WILL TALK AT YOU’, pleads the blurb to Anatomy, a new and (perhaps appropriately) disjointed compilation of Shah’s finest funnies.

Anatomy is an appropriate title for Ahir Shah’s dissective brand of comedy: following swiftly on the heels of one joke is playful analysis of the directions in which the joke could have been taken, an evaluation of its various humorous outcomes. It is often here that Shah gets the biggest laughs, as he bounds wide-eyedly about the stage, spewing a perfectly-worded deconstruction of his own material. The trick is to give the audience the sense that whatever they might think about Ahir Shah, he has thought it first. Nobody does a caveat quite so cleverly, and the effect is one of disarming charm.

Occasionally, however, Shah’s justifiable confidence as an old hand in Cambridge comedy did him no favours: only the second time did he acknowledge the awkwardness of ten-seconds’ radio silence whilst he paused to sip his Sprite, and would occasionally leave transitional silences unfilled. The comedy didn’t move at the rampant pace one might expect from Shah, whose own watch-gazing suggested that the hour was less tightly packed than it could have been. As a work-in-progress, Anatomy might have worked better as forty-five minutes of back-to-back material, than a more thinly-spread hour.

 Ahir Shah made clear in his parting words that Anatomy was not intended for reviewers’ eyes, and indeed staging it in its infancy was a risk. However, though a few nips and tucks may be required before Edinburgh, this is at base a show of poetic delicacy and white-hot wit from a man who has cultivated an intellectually dextrous style of comedy. Anatomy sees Ahir Shah bravely lay bare not just his body (‘I have the physique of someone you could save for only £2 a month’), but a bit of his soul.