Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

He may be co-anchor of Saturday Night Live UK's Weekend Update, but Paddy Young is very quick to let his audience know where he's really at in life, walking on stage to the strains of Beck’s Loser.

For despite his newfound success and puppyish good looks, this show revolves around his abject singledom, living with another ‘pathetic man baby’ in a block of flats that seems to be full of incels. Worse, his housemate has broken their unspoken contract by getting himself a girlfriend, a fresh, constant reminder of how Young’s personal life has stagnated at 35.

Nonetheless, he tries to portray himself as having the yearning, tortured soul of a poet – which isn't always in keeping with the grim reality. Tracking down a childhood ex to Copenhagen is not the grand romantic gesture he’d envisaged, but weird, creepy stalking.

Quite what’s true and what’s not isn’t always clear, as Young is prone to surreal flights of fantasy, such as the routine imagining him dating a bunch of 30 lads, mined for absurdity yet having its feet in the truth of the male loneliness epidemic.

Don’t worry about this being an issue-led show, though, because focussing on his own self-pitying sadness means the comedian can put dark comedy front and centre. 

His delivery is gentle, wounded even, yet calmly confident. Viewers of SNL will be very familiar with his coy upwards glances, used to distance himself from a harsh line or to tease us about just how sincere he’s being. 

That helps soften what could be a gloomy emotional tone – though that’s mainly achieved by having so many hugely funny lines. His writing is lyrical about the mundane, crammed full of jokes that briskly evoke perfectly incongruent images. A drunken night is described as ‘The Odyssey as if it were written by the other Homer’, for example.

He further keeps things fresh by unpredictably switching between various streams of thought, while adding looseness to the tightly-penned routines with commanding crowd work, which always pays off. Who would have thought discussion about TVs would have been so entertaining? 

He bound the room together instantly – and counterintuitively – with an opening gag in such outrageously poor taste that if you laughed at it, as most of the room did, you made an unspoken agreement to be a co-conspirator in all that follows. 

With growing TV success, this could be the last sad hurrah for Young’s loser shtick, so lap it up while you can – though he’ll surely always find something to hilariously wail about.

Review date: 17 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club