Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Paul ‘Silky’ White seems like a very sweet man. A softly-spoken Liverpudlian in his early 50s, he’s been gigging since the early 1990s and runs a popular comedy course in Leeds. 

He’s about as gentle a presence as you can imagine a comedian being, with all traces of irony or spikiness excised from his performance style. His origin story, as he reveals early on in the show, is that he used humour to defuse a volatile parent, which certainly explains his calming demeanour on stage.

The show is a bit of a grab bag, but is loosely themed around the imposter phenomenon, which he says he feels acutely. It manifests in an interesting way for him though – he seems pretty comfortable saying he’s a good comedian (‘I’ve been making people laugh from the Falklands to China’) but is always shocked when he finds out that his friends and family talk and think about him when he’s not around. It’s almost like he’s an imposter in a social sense rather than a professional one.

Breaking down that feeling, or perhaps just self-medicating, Silky spends a chunk of his hour showing us various nice things that his friends have made. There’s a little knitted Silky, a painting of Silky etc. 

In between, he plays ten-word comedy songs on his guitar and tells cute stories about tricks he’s played on friends, like the time he taught his younger sister that you can only smell your own farts. ‘She believed it for years!’ 

Oddly, a lot of his stories have a ‘you had to be there’ quality that you don’t often see in professional stand-up. Not that he struggles to hold a room, or generates anything other than an affectionate warmth in the audience, but in the cold hard light of day this is very low-impact stand-up.

Review date: 28 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Stand 2