‘Andy Burnham can grow a moustache!’: SNL UK’s Paddy Young on breakout stardom – and impersonating the new PM

Not even a grisly hand injury could halt the rise of the Saturday Night Live UK comedian. And soon he’ll get to parody the prime minister every week. So why can’t he enjoy the good times?

The day before I’m supposed to watch Paddy Young perform a work-in-progress version of his new show Will Sir Be Laughing Alone?, I’m told the gig has been cancelled; the standup has sliced his hand open and is about to have surgery. Soon after, Young shares a photo of himself on Instagram in a hospital gown, thanking the Australian comedian Sam Campbell for “bringing the sword to my home” – a post quickly rehashed by the tabloids (The Mirror: “SNL UK star Paddy Young hospitalised after samurai sword accident”). When I finally see him on stage a fortnight later, he’s dosed up on codeine, his arm is in a sling and he’s in the uncertain early stages of refashioning this bizarre anecdote into a routine.

“You’re getting an exclusive on the hand,” he tells me in an east London coffee shop the next day, after I’ve opened a bottle of water for him. Young and Campbell, who recently collaborated on the winningly madcap Channel 4 series Make That Movie, were preparing to host their occasional comedy night Floggers, which involves them dressing up as old men (fat suits, wigs, prosthetics) and helming a real daytime TV-style auction. Campbell had ordered the sword online as a prop, and when the pair’s Uber arrived Young hurriedly picked up the bag it was in. “Blood splattered up the wall like Kill Bill – we all laughed initially.” When his housemates removed the tea towel they’d wrapped around his hand “they could see yellow, which I think is tendon or muscle. Then I fainted.” He went to A&E for stitches but still did the show afterwards – “I cringe thinking about it because I was basically juggling [in the show]” – returning to hospital later to learn that one tendon was 90% lacerated and required an operation. Just before surgery, Young passed out again.

Riding high on the triumph of Saturday Night Live UK’s critically acclaimed first series – he co-anchors Weekend Update, the show’s satirical news segment, alongside Ania Magliano – Young was already about to embark on the busiest summer of his life: the Edinburgh fringe, an acting job, a new podcast, numerous Floggers shows. Now he’s cramming various medical appointments into his overstuffed diary, his recovery complicated by his inability to stay conscious. This is partly due to a severe phobia of needles, something that’s making him feel “truly pathetic”. As a veteran fainter myself, I tell him something I only recently discovered; it’s one of the five trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn and, in this case, flop. The term could describe “how I respond to a lot of things”, nods the 34-year-old. “I’m such a flop it’s unbelievable.”

If you’ve only ever seen Young behind his desk at SNL – dapper, puckish, impossibly telegenic and armed with an arsenal of edgy current affairs zingers (plus a faintly worrying fixation with K-pop boyband BTS) – you might struggle to picture him as a failure. But in his sublimely funny standup, he’s a different beast: an indignant northern underdog, a messy millennial manchild of the people, a mordant poster boy for Generation Rent hissing at home-owning audience members. In his 2023 Edinburgh newcomer award-nominated show Hungry, Horny, Scared, he mined comic gold from bleak houseshares (his flat may have been freezing but at least he had an overheating 2012 Lenovo laptop for warmth), interspersed with anecdotes about his medical-grade childhood bed-wetting. (He was eventually assigned a specialist nurse: “How much piss is that? The NHS is getting involved …”)

I had imagined this low-status shtick was mostly an act, but in person Young really does seem preoccupied with his weaknesses and rotten luck. He possesses none of the himbo-ish mischievousness of his Weekend Update performance. Instead, he’s a fast-talking, winningly candid overthinker with an “incredible talent” for seeing himself as a loser and a compulsion for self-reproach that is both completely ridiculous and extremely relatable. “I feel like I’m constantly either wronging someone or being wronged. I leave most situations thinking I really fumbled and fucked it up – or I’ve been betrayed.” (Same.)

Young’s living situation is the overarching theme of his standup; this new show sees him contemplate singledom and his “bachelor” lifestyle (he finds the term amusing). Although he no longer cohabits with strangers in misery – he lives with fellow comedians Horatio Gould and Bebe Cave – he has a grim fascination with “people that have never got out of flatshares. I’ve always thought that’s going to be me.” He’s so fixated on this fate that he often imagines it’s already a reality. “I sort of feel like a 68-year-old bloke – like it’s all gone to pot and it hasn’t at all.” While some of his anxieties stem from his precarious profession, Young’s jokes are ultimately rooted in a near-universal struggle: making ends meet in London if you don’t come “from insane wealth”.

Young grew up in Scarborough, north Yorkshire. As a schoolboy he was “so small” with no sporting talent, finding a social circle and sense of direction through his drama lessons at the Stephen Joseph theatre. It was helmed at the time by Alan Ayckbourn, one of Britain’s most prolific and popular playwrights, who cast a 10-year-old Young in one of his productions, his first professional acting gig. Ayckbourn even gave Young financial support after he won a place at Manchester School of Theatre. He was an inconsistent student, he claims; revelling in small comic turns yet performing poorly when cast as a serious lead.

After graduating, he tentatively tried standup. He was a comedy obsessive: Laurel and Hardy, Derek and Clive, Blue Jam, his dad’s collection of Viz comics, which “looked like the Beano but they were saying terrible things – that literally changed my brain chemistry”. His “extremely funny” mum was also an inspiration. Yet his early years on the circuit were awful; “going to these rubbish nights and being truly, truly depressed, then bombing and running away”. He has since realised his shtick doesn’t work at the open-mic nights that are a rite of passage for most fledgling comedians because of how he “plays with status” on stage. “I love the game of pretending it’s all falling apart, even though it actually isn’t. That doesn’t work at a gig that is actually bad.” What made him stick with comedy through the tough times? “I’m really fascinated by it – there is nothing else I think about.” He felt “mad” but had a deep-seated conviction he “could be good”.

Young’s career first began gaining traction in 2022, partly as a result of his Instagram sketches with the comedian Ed Night (“The love of my life”), which I return to repeatedly like favourite songs. The pair often parody content creators – conspiracy-minded podcasters, board game influencers and whatever people who make day-in-the-life vlogs are called – whose output Young describes as “the end of culture, but I can’t take my eyes off it”.

Yet virality is relative. “You might pat yourself on the back because 200,000 people watch your video but then you scroll down and someone’s getting hit with a frying pan and it’s got 30m.” He doesn’t particularly like social media and thinks he’s “probably doing it completely wrong. It’s geared to be all about consistency” – posting “all the time” – whereas he and Night have a backlog of sketches they’ve never uploaded because they don’t think they’re up to scratch. He also feels slightly unsettled by how little work this kind of content requires compared with crafting an hour of standup. It’s a similar story with his new agony uncle podcast, Paddy Will Help (working tagline: “Oprah for blokes”). When we speak he’s in the process of workshopping the format, but knows he won’t be winging it with the kind of free-flowing parasocial banter his peers churn out. He likes finessing his material. “I couldn’t just be sat on the sofa chatting.”

Sounds to me as if he’s got integrity, yet Young also sees this as a failure to capitalise on his success (he has learned from friends that standups who pivot to podcasting “earn more than TV comedians”). While his peers discuss their five-year plans and audition strategies, “I’m fumbling in the dark. Everything I do, genuinely, there is no plan.”

In the end he didn’t need one. Last year, he was cast in SNL UK: a huge opportunity he knew he was perfectly suited for (when he was told about the British version, his first thought was: “I have to do this. There’s less being made than ever and it just feels like you’re not quite right [for most TV projects],” he told me in February). The show has offered him unexpected job security, the chance to break out of his own social media bubble – after just one month its sketches had amassed more than 86m online views – and a dose of surreal glamour. “You’re running down the corridor to get a wig fitted and then you pass Louis Theroux chatting to a beefeater. It really does feel like showbusiness, which nothing else does.” That said, being recognised in public isn’t the panacea he imagined. “You feel like someone’s got something on you – they know me and I don’t know them.”

Young may need to prepare for more fan encounters: his SNL star is rising. Weekend Update has featured some surprisingly bracing satire and some genuinely great comic writing (“This week, former entertainer and entertainer of sixth-formers, Russell Brand …”). The more I watched, however, the more I became convinced of Young’s ability to sell literally any gag with a choice look or inflection. Initially, he begs to differ: “If it’s a joke I don’t like, I can’t say it – it pains me.” Yet trapped behind his desk, he is gradually finding “a way to pretend” if he’s not fully on board. Although he’s allowed to veto any quips he really doesn’t like – he tries to steer away from poking fun at voters of specific political parties, for example – he thinks it’s important to take this rare chance to really push the envelope. “There are people on set that are 30 years older than me that tell me they’ve never got away with this on TV.”

One slightly disappointing thing about the first series of SNL UK was how underutilised Young was as a comic actor. No longer: in the final episode of last season, he played Andy Burnham in a sketch about politicians jostling to become the next prime minister. Given the former mayor of Manchester ascent to the top job, Young looks set to reprise the role regularly next season. His Burnham isn’t a million miles away from his standup persona – they both use “shagger” as a term of endearment and hold southern extravagance in theatrical contempt – but the icing on the cake would be if Burnham “could grow a moustache over the summer”. Couldn’t Young shave his off? Nope – apparently it has talismanic properties. “I don’t know where my career would be without it. It’s like scaffolding.”

SNL UK will be back in September and then again in January. In between, Young will tour the UK. It’s a strange sensation, having a full schedule until March. “I’m 34 and I’ve never known what I’m doing for more than six months.” Yet his success still hasn’t sunk in – besides, what if this good fortune is merely a flash in the pan? He’s so haunted by an encounter with an older comic who outlined his rapidly declining income after a career peak (“It’s always those stories that stick with me – any time I hear about someone who earns £5m a year, I forget”) that he’s considering drastic measures in the hope of turning what he fears could be a brief moment in the sun into a lifelong safety net.

“I’m not a gambler, but I have thought: do I put all of my pay on red? Insane thoughts like that.” Young may not believe he’s made the big time yet, but I’d still bet against him being in that flatshare at 68.

Paddy Young tours the UK from 17 September to 12 December; tour starts Plymouth.