If it really takes, as they say, 10 years to become a good standup comedian, Sophie Buddle is going to be phenomenal at around the age of 25. She’s already good at the tender age of 22. Do the math. Yes, she started at 15.

Buddle started going on weekly date nights with her mom to open mikes in her hometown of Ottawa when she was 14. That’s when she caught the bug. Comedy consumed her. She started devouring standup. Ellen DeGeneres was an early favourite. “I used to memorize her bits and do them for my mom and we’d both pee our pants,” she says at a West End coffee shop. A year later, she got on-stage herself, and she hasn’t let up since.

She’s still fixated on it, despite being a seven-year veteran. “I listen to podcasts, I watch specials, I watch clips, I read about comedy,” she says. “I’m really obsessed with standup comedy. I don’t think it helps me that much; I’m just obsessed with it.”

If it doesn’t help her, she must just be a natural. Buddle recently advanced to the final of the SiriusXM Top Comic competition, which will be held in Toronto on September 29. Winner gets 25 large. In July, she represented B.C. in the Just for Laughs Homegrown competition in Montreal, the city of her birth and where she often tells people she’s from. (“I lie and tell people I’m not from Ottawa. I like to mix it up. And my name is Sophie so people think, ‘Oh, maybe she’s French.’”)

She’s also making a name for herself in Los Angeles. After she opened for Moshe Kasher at Just for Laughs last year, Kasher vouched for Buddle and she was able to get on some pretty hip live L.A. standup shows, including Meltdown, hosted by Jonah Ray and Kumail Nanjiani, which she’s done twice, most recently September 7, and Hot Tub with Kurt Braunohler and Kristen Schaal.

It’s good to have friends in high places, but Buddle, who is extremely reluctant to blow her own horn, says about Kasher, “I don’t think he likes me, or talking to me, but he seems to like my jokes.”

Buddle started headlining earlier this year and goes out on the road occasionally, never the easiest thing for a comic, let alone a 22-year-old female one. But she maintains a positive outlook. “It can be irritating,” she says of the sexist heckling she sometimes gets, “but I can deal with it. It’s not that bad. I still get to do comedy and get paid for it.” Getting there is another question. “I don’t have a car, so that’s how I choose my opening acts—whoever has a car and is available.”

Since she started standup at 15, she’s changed. “I’ve gotten taller,” she says with a laugh. But so has her act. “I’m less dirty now. I’m still a pretty dirty comic but less blatantly sexual for no reason. I was trying to seem older and I thought that’s what older people did.”

Buddle will be doing yet another contest in November, the prestigious Seattle Comedy Competition, won last year by Vancouver comic Dino Archie. It’s quality standups like him, Graham Clark, Erica Sigurdson, Ivan Decker, and Kyle Bottom, among others, that keep her in Vancouver.

“I want to do shows in New York and L.A. but I like living here a lot and I really love the comedy here,” she says. “I think it’s world-class comedy.” With the relatively small number of shows, younger comics get to perform with the seasoned professionals on a regular basis. “I always thought that pros kind of had their couple hours of material and interchanged it a little, but I thought the writing slowed down a lot once you got to that level. But in Vancouver they write more than everybody else. That’s what it seems like, anyway. That’s what I’ve projected onto them.”

The trickle-down theory may not work in economics, but it seems to be paying dividends for Buddle and other young Vancouver comedians.