Not your average Dad jokes: the comedian that all my mum friends fancy

Times

9 hours ago

George Lewis has been my maternity leave companion. The 37-year-old comedian from Stockport clocks up hundreds of thousands of views for his Instagram reels. Mums on maternity leave, he tells me, form a big bulk of his audience. I can see why. On the trials of parenting young children, he is brilliantly entertaining and instantly relatable — an antidote to all those social media accounts sharing visions of perfect parenting. And fellow mums admit to a bit of a crush on Lewis. With his very good hair and cheeky grin, he is a dad you might not mind bumping into at the school gate.
He started posting comedy sketches on Instagram during the pandemic and it was the parenting ones that struck a chord. He has three children, aged two, five and seven, with his wife, Harriet, and 625,000 remarkably well-behaved Instagram followers. His series in which two toddlers chat to one another like adult friends is among his most popular content. The toddlers (both played by Lewis) discuss the devastation of dropping a piece of banana on the floor, adding 'character' to blank, freshly painted walls with a crayon, and the impact of dropping the daytime nap: 'Maybe it has affected me a little bit.' We've all been there.
Lewis has found his people, then. So much so that he was, he tells me, reluctant to go on tour. But his show The Best Thing You'll Ever Do was a sell-out over the summer, packed with fellow parents, whom he describes as 'the nicest audiences I've ever played to'. He has now added more dates for September.
While there's nothing like the instant noise from a live crowd — that feeling is 'just amazing', Lewis says — Instagram is also quick to provide feedback. And he feels a warmth through his work now that was never there before.
'I wasn't really enjoying it any more,' he says of stand-up, which he had been doing for more than a decade. He was going through the motions, trying to win over a (mostly drunk) late-night audience. The cans of Nice sauvignon were certainly flowing when I saw his live show at the Bloomsbury Theatre, but there was a sense of camaraderie — gangs of mums, couples, pregnant women — guffawing at gags about the madness of nursery rules about sickness and the awfulness of the cartoon bunny Bing.
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The hopeless dad is a well-loved and well-used comedy trope — looking at you, Bluey, Peppa Pig, The Simpsons. Of course Lewis has a reel on the topic — a dad feeding his child at a café — where strangers congratulate Dad on his parenting heroism. 'What a man … I hope your wife knows just how lucky she is.' Mums doing the same are, conversely, treated with contempt: 'If you wouldn't mind just cleaning that up on your way out.' It has generated hundreds of comments, many sharing similar experiences.
One topic he wouldn't mine for laughs is autism. His elder son, Teddy, was diagnosed autistic by the NHS last year, while his daughter, Daisy, is being assessed. He wouldn't want audiences to feel sorry for him, he says, 'though there is a lot of funny stuff and I think having a laugh about the difficult stuff helps'. And it has been his and Harriet's biggest challenge as parents. 'You find yourself fighting every day for something you never asked for. Constantly trying to prove how bad things can be in order to get your child the support they need in life,' he wrote on Instagram at the end of last year.
Now he just feels grateful to have the recognition of the diagnosis and says that, while there are challenges and frustrations, it's worth it for the 'amazing bits'.
It's clear that Lewis loves being a dad. He talks about his gratitude at being in a job that enabled him to be at home when his children were little. By giving him an insight into the realities of maternity leave — 'which isn't just being at home having a nice time' — that experience has played a significant part in his success. 'I went through the stuff that, traditionally, mums go through — the loss of self, the feeling of never achieving anything.' And mums love him for it.
Fatherhood has also made him far more emotional: 'I can cry at anything.' But he admits to feeling a greater happiness than he ever thought possible. With that, though, comes a fear of it all slipping by too quickly. 'I already cast my mind forward and then get sad about missing the thing that's happening now,' he says.
He's supportive of the government's recently announced review into paternity leave — one in three dads don't take paternity leave and take-up of shared leave remains very low. 'Anything that can even it up is so important,' Lewis says. For starters it is, he says, better for the relationship between the two parents. Plus there's the added benefit of children growing up witnessing equality in action.
Having sat through the Netflix drama Adolescence, he's terrified of his kids getting phones and hopes that legislation will be in place to safeguard them. He admits, though, to needing to have more boundaries around his own phone use. Witnessing other parents ignore their children in favour of a TikTok reel can be challenging for Lewis — 'I'll think, oh, that's so sad, and then I'll think, I do that. I definitely do that.'
It's also true that phones are a lifeline, especially for mums on maternity leave. We're the ones watching his videos. 'That's the way of connecting with the world and seeing something funny and getting through,' Lewis says.