Ahir Shah, who won the Edinburgh comedy award in 2023 with a show that was not even eligible when the festival began, returns to the fringe this year with a follow-up inspired by the poets and philosophers Gerard Manley Hopkins and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Few past winners of the Edinburgh comedy award seemed less likely at the start than Shah did in August 2023. He was a credible contender — he had been nominated twice before — but that year he arrived at the fringe with a work in progress, a format barred from the award altogether.

The circumstances were difficult. His director, Adam Brace, had recently died. Shah had just returned to the stage after a break from comedy.

Then things changed. Ends, his tribute to his late grandfather and a hymn to multicultural Britain, began gathering momentum. Shah reclassified it as a work-now-finished, and to a chorus of rapturous acclaim it took the biggest prize in world comedy.

Three years on, the new show is less uncut diamond and more, Shah hopes, a polished gem. Didn't the success of Ends prove polish was unnecessary? "You can get very in your head approaching the fringe, thinking: 'Well, it has to be absolutely locked in by August because x thousand pounds are on the line,'" Shah admits.

Doing a work in progress, he says, allowed him to "quiet some of those voices – and have less of a panic attack about what you're going to say".

The title of the new show — and Shah's insistence that he is "not Mr Saturday Night" — signals where his ambitions now lie. The reference points are not panel-show banter but Hopkins, the Victorian Jesuit poet of sprung rhythm, and Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose shadow falls across plenty of serious theatre and hardly any stand-up rooms.

That a comic who took comedy's most prestigious award with an unfinished hour about grief and multicultural Britain now frames his follow-up around two canonical heavyweights tells you where the form's highbrow end currently sits. Whether Edinburgh audiences follow him from grandfather to German philosophy will be one of this festival's more interesting tests.