Brighton date as "the funniest dad on Instagram" explores parenthood

His live show captures the absurdity of modern life, drawing from the year he's had, full of big moments like getting a new hoover, binge-watching too much Netflix and accidentally becoming the face of reluctant adulthood. Following his son’s autism diagnosis, he’s also a proud ambassador for Autistica.

Described as 'the funniest dad on Instagram', George has amassed hundreds of millions of views with his online sketches covering everything from the trials of air fryers to the agony of family jigsaw sessions – and that’s what has enabled the tour to scale the heights it has.

“It started off with me agreeing to do 15 dates but when tickets sell, your ego takes over! My agent said we could do a few more dates and you think well yes if that's what people want so we added a few more and it grew and grew.

“But the fact is that stand-up gets better the more you do it.

“I worked as a club comedian, a jobbing comedian for well over a decade before I started doing things online. And I had my club set that I would do almost anywhere. I would travel to wherever it was, Doncaster or Hull or Bristol or wherever, and I would do virtually the same 20 minutes. I knew it was reliable. But it could become a bit robotic.

“But this is different now. This is more talking about real things and about my life and about personal observations so it just doesn’t become robotic because you are so much more connected. And the more I tell the audience about these kinds of things, the more they relate to it and the more you feel connected with them. When you know that they’re recognising what you’re talking about it gives you freedom to go even further. I’m about 100 shows in now and I never thought I would say that! There are so few shows left that I am just wanting to enjoy every single one of them. I’ve even started casting my mind forward to when I will be missing doing them.

“And the lovely thing is that the venues I’ve been doing especially this year are the bigger ones, the ones I have done before when I’ve been supporting other comedians. I never thought that I’d get to do them myself. So really this is just such a surreal pleasure to be doing them now.”

Key to the show is talking about being a parent: “I have not worked it out but so many of the experiences that I’m talking about are just so universal and there is something so healthy for me to be talking about them. I’m finding that people recognise them and have been there before. When you are a parent, you can feel alone with the struggles and the experiences you are having but when you’re doing a show like this you realise that so many other parents have had had exactly the same experiences.

“I think what I have learned is that the key to parenting is understanding and empathy for your children. I think you have to try to see things from your children’s point of view. When you start doing that then it kind of makes more sense when you have the wild behaviour and the meltdowns. It seems irrational to us but if you see it from your children’s point of view it seems less irrational.”

George is dad to three children, aged seven, six and two. The eldest has been diagnosed with autism/ADHD, and as George says he is still in the middle of the fight for his middle child, a daughter.

“With our first child it was a lot more straightforward than it has been with our daughter. It just took time. From being told by a paediatrician ‘I think we might be looking at autism’ it was years, maybe three or four years, and at that point that was most of his life. It was the waiting and the limbo.

“And then the diagnosis doesn’t actually unlock that much. When we got the diagnosis we just got a leaflet about autism that had a picture of a young boy playing with a train set on the front!”

But at least it gave the family certainty: “Before that, all the time we were saying ‘We think it might be this’ and all the time you were just second guessing but now we know what it is and we know where we are. He is autistic and we don’t have to talk about the challenges. We can celebrate all the good things. We can celebrate who he is. And it gives us a starting point. We can think about all the amazing things. And even though it has been so challenging there is no way that I would take the autism away from them. It is who they are. It is not something that is wrong. They are just wired differently and in so many, many ways they are just absolutely incredible.”