Patrick Susmilch

After appearing on the eighth season of Last Comic Standing and working the club circuit for over a decade, Susmilch took a break to work as a legal assistant in Los Angeles. He returned for a run at the Edinburgh Fringe with a show that bypassed standard club comedy. He draws audiences willing to sit through a heavy narrative rather than expecting a steady clip of punchlines.

On his 2016 album Validate Me, he focuses on physical discomfort and mundane anxieties. He does material about catheters, body image, and urinary tract infections, treating all of it with a cheerful shrug. In his 2023 solo hour Texts from My Dead Friends, he drops conventional joke writing almost completely. He reads old text messages to document the deaths of multiple friends, delivering the grim facts with straightforward sincerity. He gets laughs not from manufactured punchlines, but by treating profound grief as just another conversational thread.