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A few years ago, George Lewis was driving back from performing in a comedy club when he realized he had to change his life.
He had played the same club several years earlier, also for just a few minutes and also for little more than gas money. Both times, he did what he had to do. He showed up. He made the audience laugh.
Now, though, he was a parent. He needed a more stable income, and his material felt tired. Yet the thing that filled his days — looking after his children — was a no-go for standup, older comics told him: a sure way to get pigeonholed.
“It was like: ‘Maybe when you have kids, don’t mention that you’ve got kids,’” he said, recalling their earlier advice.
“Obviously,” he continued, “now I realize it’s quite the opposite.”
In the years since that night, Mr. Lewis, now 37, has become a bard of British parenting comedy. He’s on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. His route to success began after the pandemic, when he began posting short online videos that gently mocked (and commiserated with) his fellow British millennial parents.
In some sketches, Mr. Lewis acts the harried grown-up. In the clip below, he’s trying to adhere to a nap schedule while driving. There’s an unseen toddler in the back who mustn’t be allowed to fall asleep. As they approach home, he gets increasingly desperate.
“Should we sing?” he asks. “Do the actions! Big energy!” he commands. Then, he tries swerving, which is more dangerous than fun. their times, he pretends to be a kid. In one long-running series, he stages conversations between toddlers who sound a lot like adults but who deadpan the baffling logic of two year olds. (The series, Two Toddlers Chatting, is his most popular, he said, with about 60 million views on Instagram alone.)
In one sketch, a toddler shares some real concerns. His father keeps covering his face — which makes him disappear. Then, his dad comes back, saying this odd, upsetting word.
“He was behaving so erratically,” the toddler tells his friend. “He just started shouting, ‘Peek-a-boo.’”
“‘Peek-a-boo?’” his friend replies. “Is he OK, like, mentally?”
It’s a low-budget effort, run almost entirely off his phone. He films in his kitchen, plays all the characters, and edits clips between school pickups and bath time. In video after video, he unspools comedy gold about the gulf between the earnest rituals of modern parenting and the essential, eternal weirdness of a small child’s inner life.
“The more mundane and frustrating, the better the sketch that comes out,” he said. “So it really is a great way of going about your day.”
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George Lewis, a bard of British parenting comedy, is on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times
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