Paddy Young has left his home in Scarborough and is trying to make a living as a comic in London.   Which means he’s living in a house-share.

 

He has some absolutely brilliant crowd-work around the housing crisis.  Young seeks out the boomers in the audience and positively drools at the notion that they own property.

 

He fantasises about kitchen islands, living rooms and kitchens you can cook in and visibly shrinks and quivers in the face of the property-owning members of his audience.

 

Young makes his desperation an asset.  But he’s a confident and relaxed performer who is tremendously at home on the stage.

 

His self-deprecation is full of outrageous poetic flourishes and he’s brilliant at turning little bits of audience interaction into proper jokes.

 

Young has a long picaresque description of being a bed-wetter when he was a child.   He also has a great bit about a stranded sea lion on Scarborough Beach which went viral when it started masturbating.

 

He has a lifelong feud with bullies and jugglers, which also started with an unfortunate incident on Scarborough beach.

 

Young mines his Yorkshire childhood for laughs while also sending up his precarious existence as an aspiring Londoner.

 

He works intently with the energy in the room – looking for reactions and finding people who want to interact.   He’s happy to bounce off the crowd – making surreal observations – or crumpling to the floor when it seems their lives may be better than his.

 

Young is never punching down, because he’s continually making himself the punchline.   But for all his protestations of poverty and desperation, there is a richness and an assurance about his style of comedy which bodes very well for the future.  

 

He has an original style, quick on his feet, likeable and very funny.

 

Maybe there’ll be a kitchen island in his life one day.