Twitter’s funniest dad, James Breakwell, has been regaling audiences since 2012 with his tweets about his four daughters. His account (@XplodingUnicorn) has over a million followers, and features quotes and quips from his children. (Breakwell: Hey! We don’t lick people. Two-year-old daughter: I do).
The social media star’s second book, Bare Minimum Parenting: The Ultimate Guide to Not Quite Ruining Your Child , which promises to “teach you to get by while doing less” as a parent, is only a few days old, but has already got netizens exchanging notes. Talk show host Jennifer Fulwiler tweeted, “If you were to sit down with an experienced parent, give him three shots of whisky, and then ask for his advice, that would be this book.”
Breakwell rose to Internet fame in 2016 after Buzzfeed wrote about his hilarious tweets. He is, by his own admission, an underachieving parent. But he asks an important (and rhetorical) question about raising children: “Why work harder to be a great parent when your kid will turn out just as well if you’re a mediocre one?” His book, he says, exists to counteract the droves of high-achieving parenting books already in print.
Family man
US-based Breakwell uses pseudonyms for his family, including for himself. But he uses actual images of his family on social media. “That way, people couldn’t Google us to find our home address or figure out where my kids go to school,” he explains. “It’s hard to track somebody down based only on their picture. All little kids kind of look the same.”
The concept of bare minimum parenting, he says, is one that he has been testing ever since he first became a dad eight years ago. “There have been times I’ve been tempted to try too hard, but usually I’m able to resist,” he jokes.
In a recent tweet responding to allegations that his jokes were not all authentic, Breakwell suggested that “kids are more ridiculous than you think”. He admits, though, that his jokes are a mixed bag. “Some are real, some are exaggerated, and some are made up, but they’re all inspired by my kids. If my four daughters haven’t done them yet, somebody else’s kids certainly have,” he says. “That’s why other parents relate to my comedy so strongly.”
Laughs for all
But his humour is not just for parents. He has a Star Wars parody account on Twitter (@VeryLonelyLuke), where Luke Skywalker poses existential questions and profound reflections about life (“The Jedi pension plan just sucks”). He has three webcomics: Unbelievably Bad is a comic take on family life using Calibri font and the most basic shape tools available on Microsoft; in Unfridgeworthy , he takes drawings and paintings by his children and “makes up horribly inappropriate stories to go with them”; and in Wombat Dojo , we are introduced to the lives of two roommates and their pet wombat.
His children, he admits, do not think his tweets are funny. “To be fair, only half of them can read. The only social media network that matters to them is YouTube, and I have a very minor following there,” he says.
Even though the extra followers and social media fandom have made humour less of a fun diversion and more of a survival mechanism (“I can either write jokes or I can have a nervous breakdown”), Breakwell sees his humour as a skill that his children should adopt. “I am not funnier than anybody else, but I’m good at isolating the funny things around me and sharing those moments with other people. Even the worst Monday morning is good for a few funny tweets.”
While the audience for his new book consists largely of parents, its humour is relatable to anyone with children in their lives. “A lot of people recognise their younger siblings in the things I write about,” he says. Up next after Bare Minimum Parenting is a guided journal for children, designed to help them find humour in everyday situations.
Bare Minimum Parenting: The Ultimate Guide to Not Quite Ruining Your Child, published by BenBella Books, is available on amazon.in. Prices start at ₹209.
