Paddy Young: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? review – morose misadventures of a luckless bachelor

The SNL UK star’s romantic failures and house-share humiliations make for a fun hour of downbeat yet twinkling comedy

A recent star of Saturday Night Live UK, Paddy Young is enjoying a moment of life-changing fulfilment and success. But “I’ve brought the worst plus-one to the party,” he says – by which he means himself. If ever the truism that money can’t buy you happiness needed demonstration, look no further than Young’s new show, Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? It finds the 35-year-old lamenting (as ever) the circularity of his domestic life, a luckless perma-bachelor doomed for ever to watch on as his housemates graduate to more grown-up, loved-up lives elsewhere.

Young has cultivated the perfect persona to sell this sorry tale: a plangent northerner, half-turned away from the audience and side-eyeing us coyly with this or that tale of hapless manboyishness. Is it an act? Well, no, it’s an exaggeration, and part of the fun is to work out how sincere sad-sack Paddy really is, halfway through his three score years and 10, stuck in a house share with “three PS2s and not a lamp in sight”. He’s bothered not that his flatmate is having sex too noisily, but that it’s not audible enough (“Let me in!”). Ghosted by a recent date, he has resorted to stalking his first teenage kiss on Facebook, then all the way to Copenhagen, fantasising about inserting himself into her wholesome family life.

You might think this would get bleak. Certainly, Young’s downbeat sense of self pre-empts much comic momentum. Consolation is to be found in the Scarborough man’s evident relish for his own enfeeblement, and a strain of triumphalism at the small victories (his flatmate’s baldness versus Paddy’s flourishing head of hair, say) afforded even to those who lose at the lottery of life.

That loserdom is offset too by Young’s standup skills, as evidenced tonight by some very adroit crowd-work, and by the kind of small-screen success that leads to audience members showing up in DIY Paddy Young T-shirts. How sustainable is Young’s shmuck shtick in the face of such adulation? On this evidence, you’d expect – and hope for – plenty more morose-but-twinkling comedy from a man whose Saturday nights may be live, but whose every other night is lived vicariously through long-lost girlfriends and his more sexually successful housemates.

• At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 30 August
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