Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update.
So you’d think a stand-up show bemoaning that he’s a permanently single loser might not entirely convince. But no, he’s all good: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? kicks off with a joke so kamikaze inappropriate that you have to think there’s a vague chance of it escaping isolation and screwing up his career. So probably best not share it here.
Young’s surreal, somewhat poetic set paints him as an arch oddball whose singledom can be attributed to weirdness, moroseness and an inability to comprehend the rules of life in general. He obsesses over the first girl he kissed, reasoning she is the answer to his funk, tracking her down to Copenhagen and planning to fly out to see her; he dates a group of 30 men (called ‘the lads’) all at once, a logistical nightmare; he stews over his housemate’s greater romantic success and takes petty solace in the fact he has the better hair of the two.
I would say most of this is very definitely made up, but Young’s stand-up has its own weird artificial gravity that kind of means that even if you don’t believe what he’s saying to, you know what he means: the man we see before us is a massive loser, or at least he is for the purposes of the show. And reality and tall tales are amusingly blurred – I don’t believe Young dated 30 men at once but I do believe he injured his hand in a freak accident with a samurai sword because it’s been relatively well documented that this happened.
He’s also the only SNL UK cast member I’ve seen at the Fringe this year to really ‘go there’ in terms of talking about the show: probably he needs to address it in order to assure us he’s still a loser, but it’s deftly handled and offers an amusingly bitter payoff.
Can he keep this up in the face of mounting success? It’s an interesting question and it’s worth pointing out that he pulled half his Fringe run in order to get in the zone for the imminent SNL season two – maybe Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? is the final, morose hurrah for his old life before he has to dream things up anew. But he’s such a persuasive loser that somehow I doubt it.
