Review: PADDY YOUNG: IF I TOLD YOU I’D HAVE TO KISS YOU, Soho Theatre

“A boy with a car . . . What does the future hold?”

Paddy Young: If I Told You I’d Have to Kiss You is a show in which Young takes us into his world and his desires, looking back on his life so far and telling the audience about the people he has fallen in love with along the way. We are introduced to Daisy, who puts Young in the “chauffeur zone,” Jess, a girl Young was too nervous to talk to on the bus, and even the women of Babestation who made him so nervous he didn’t know what to say when he called the number on the television screen.

We learn a bit more about Young’s life, including how he got a car from his grandmother at the age of seventeen and how he was picked on for playing Warhammer. During the more dramatic moments in which Young is talking about his lost loves, the house lights go dim and a spotlight shines on Young alone, with red light filling the stage around him and dramatic instrumentals playing in the background. 

While the main theme of the show is love, there are plenty of other topics that Young touches upon throughout the show, including how “the cruellest thing you can do to someone is let them be on telly once,” the struggles of having access to too many beautiful people on social media and his deep hatred of plays, something I definitely disagreed with but certainly had a fun time listening to! 

There are quite a few darker jokes in the show that Young really dedicates himself to, including a recurring bit about kissing a range of phallic objects including fleshlights and penises. It sometimes comes out of nowhere as a startling moment in between stories about childhood and love but it works to Young’s advantage, allowing him to change the momentum as he pleases.

My particular favourites were one about bananas being the Al-Qaeda of fruits (did you know “banana” is an anagram for “Bin Laden?”) and another about his teenage dream to have pubic hair, which led to my favourite quote of the night - “I didn’t have pubes but my god I had heart.” At one point, Young even takes some shots at the Soho Theatre itself, with the screens only being used once in the show to show a chart he has made to show off the theatre’s dynamic pricing and the levels of audience interaction one might face based on where they’re sitting. 

As one comes to learn after seeing over one hundred comedy shows in a year, there are going to be some shows that don’t go exactly as planned. This night’s version of Young’s show was a prime example of that, with the comedian himself admitting that it felt like he was trapped in a nightmare situation that he couldn’t wake up from. If you’ve seen Joker, you might see some similarities between Arthur Fleck and Young as they struggle to keep their composure, though Young’s cracking is a bit more justifiable as he is dealing with an audience that he refers to as a “mixed ability crowd” and isn’t planning on murdering anyone - I think. 

There was also a period in which his microphone cut out and it took several minutes for the person working in the tech booth to get his attention, leading to a pause in the scripted show as Young questioned the life choices that led him to this moment of dealing with strange audience members and faulty microphones.

While some comedians might have allowed these incidents to completely throw them off, Young made them a part of the show, making comments like “What you gotta realise about comedy is that momentum is the enemy” and referring to one particular audience member as “Chekhov’s Clown,” desperately trying to avoid getting them involved in future audience participation after a disastrous first few interactions. 

Paddy Young: If I Told You I’d Have to Kiss You is a great comedy show about love and its consequences, with Young taking the audience on his lifelong quest to find love over his hour with them. Young may have been on “Struggle Street,” as he called it, but the show itself is solid and he does a fantastic job of rolling with the punches and adjusting the show to make it work for the audience he is dealing with. 

Paddy Young: If I Told You I’d Have to Kiss You runs from until 20 November at Soho Theatre.

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