Tajpaul Singh Chowdhry, better known as Paul Chowdhry, is an English comedian and actor. He is of Indian Punjabi Sikh descent. He began his stand up career in 1998 and hosted the Channel 4 comedy series Stand Up for the Week as of the fifth series, having been a regular act for the third and fourth series. Chowdhry was the first British act to perform at the Caribbean Comedy Festival in Trinidad in 2003. He has been a guest panelist on 8 out of 10 Cats, Comedy World Cup, and Sorry, I Didn't Know. He has appeared on Live at the Apollo twice, in 2012 and 2015. In 2016, he was one of the contestants on series three of the comedy show Taskmaster. In 2017, he was a guest stand-up performer in The Russell Howard Hour and also sold out the 10,000-seater Wembley Arena, becoming the first British Asian stand-up comic to do so. In 2020, Chowdhry appeared in the television drama series Devils. Since 2021, he has been hosting the podcast The Paul Chowdhry PudCast, in which he interviews comedians. He uses the signature phrase "what's happening white people?" at the start of his stand-up routines.
Chowdhry in 2015
Stand Up for the Week is a British television comedy series that was shown on Channel 4, featuring stand-up comedy performances reflecting topical events. The show began in June 2010 with a six-episode series aired on Friday nights, moving to Saturday nights for the second series which began in March 2011. The first series was hosted by Patrick Kielty, with regular performers Jack Whitehall, Kevin Bridges, Andi Osho and Rich Hall. Bridges replaced Kielty as host for the second series, with Jon Richardson joining as a regular performer. Richardson took over as host of the show for the third series which aired in late 2011, and aside from Rich Hall returning, an otherwise entirely new group of regular performers joined the show: Seann Walsh, Sara Pascoe, Josh Widdicombe and Paul Chowdhry. For the fourth series Andrew Lawrence replaced Rich Hall. For the fifth series, Chowdhry took over as host and new regulars Angela Barnes, Simon Evans and Romesh Ranganathan replaced Chowdhry, Lawrence and Pascoe. In October 2015 Channel 4 confirmed there are no plans to produce more episodes of the show.
Stand Up for the Week