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.
Other 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.”
He has the timing just right: TikTok and Instagram have arguably become comedy’s biggest stage. And it’s not just videos: Several parenting and relationship podcasts took off during the pandemic and now crowd the top of British comedy lists.
“The audience has always been there,” said Sophie McCartney, a Liverpool-born comedian, who turned her “Tired and Tested” mom persona into a comedy career with a podcast, two books and live stand-up tours. But the pandemic supercharged demand and supply of parenting comedy online, she said. “We were all trapped inside of our houses with our children of varying ages, and the internet was just pure escapism.”
Celebrities come on “Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe” (episodes include “The Christmas Stress Tornado” and “Playdate from Hell”) to dish about life with kids.
“The reason it works is it comes from a place of ‘We’re really trying,’” said Mr. Widdicombe, a veteran of Britain’s stand-up circuit. It would be grating to listen to venting, he said. Instead, it’s precisely because they actually like being parents that their jokes land. “You can love your kids, but also think, ‘I can’t engage with playing shop for three hours without feeling like my brain is rotting,’” he added.
Mr. Lewis and Mr. Widdicombe are among the British comics riffing on millennial parenting, in which men are expected to — and want to — play more active roles at home than their fathers or grandfathers did. Many households are also juggling the particular challenges of this era: expensive child care and housing shortages, both partners working and a perfectionist approach to child rearing that can be intensified by sunshine-and-rainbows influencers and the latest “gentle parenting” edicts.
Yes, the comics say, their kids are wonderful, hilarious, the actual lights of their actual lives. But also, parenting can be isolating. And even with the best of intentions, things go wrong.
“Failure is funny,” explained Sam Avery, a British comic who has long joked about raising kids. “And parenting is 90 percent failure.”
The increasing success of the genre may also be a function of the technology itself, several British comedy critics and experts said. Online, specificity sells. The almighty algorithm sorts users by interests, so creators who stay on message get more traction. They do one thing, over and over, to delight their followers. Much like playing with a toddler.
For Mr. Lewis, the dad stuff was kind of an accident (His children — now 6, 5 and almost 2 — were not). He’d post a sketch, then wait anxiously by his phone, as likes trickled in. He does cover other subjects — like cringe-watching the surprisingly explicit movie, “Saltburn” — but his most successful work is parenting-related. Of his more than half-a-million followers on Instagram, about 80 percent are women, he said, and most are between the ages of 30 and 44. (“Quite clearly, overwhelmingly, mums!” he said.)
“Have we got parents in?” he said, opening a show in Brighton, a city on Britain’s south coast. The packed club laughed and cheered. “Yeah,” he grinned. “I thought there might be.”
“He kind of makes light the really challenging parts of parenthood,” said Hannah Worrell, a mother in her 30s who came to the show. “It makes you feel like it’s, ‘Oh, it’s not just us that go through that.’”
Mr. Lewis keeps track of ideas in disordered lists on the Notes app — a fragment of a joke, a sentence he overheard at a school pickup. He writes when his older children are at school and his toddler is asleep, a stolen hour or two around midday. Sometimes, he reminds them to be quiet while he records a few takes into his phone, often standing in the kitchen (it gets the best light).
The kids only kind of understand what he does for work.
“Tells jokes?” his daughter said, squirming in her seat once her parents had served dinner.
“What’s daddy’s job?” prodded Harriett Brettell, his wife, who is an education consultant. “Who does he try to make laugh?”
“Grown-ups?” his son asked.
But they are his inspiration.
“This is all actual research,” Ms. Brettell, 36, joked as she and her husband orbited each other in the controlled chaos of mealtime.
Minutes later, their 5-year-old daughter walked up to them with blue marker drawn on her lips like lipstick (it was not toxic, luckily). Mr. Lewis bent down, gently explaining that markers are not makeup, while Ms. Brettell wiped it off.
Maybe there would be a joke in that, too.