Jim Gaffigan Cooks Up Comedy In Quarantine With New YouTube Show

Stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan is going a bit stir-crazy.

“We’ve been in quarantine for about a month now, and it’s really changed my dad,” his oldest daughter, Marre, whispers to the camera in one of his recent YouTube videos. “He said he wanted to help out with like, breakfast and dinner, so my mom was super relieved with that, but it’s gotten to the point where he thinks he’s a real chef, and he keeps saying, ‘Let’s get cookin’.”

The video swaps to a supercut of Gaffigan cheerfully (and occasionally with a slightly deranged edge) repeating his new catchphrase.

But don’t get too worried–it’s all in good fun. Gaffigan’s new YouTube project–perhaps unsurprisingly called Let’s Get Cookin’–is an affectionate spoof on Food Network-esque shows featuring celebrity chefs whipping up glamorous dishes in down home, country kitchen sets. Gaffigan’s Get Cookin’ shtick follows in their footsteps, only instead of making truffle risotto or complicated consommé or beef wellington, he’s making toast (with bread, which is just “wet flour,” according to Gaffigan), hot dogs (on their own and with eggs), and meatball parmesan (with three-day-old sauce and mildly, er, let’s say crispy meatballs).

Gaffigan began posting the series to his channel in mid-April, and has since uploaded 11 installments that have collectively netted 731K views. His channel–which has 348K subscribers–has been around since 2009, but prior to April, it was pretty barren, bringing in around 3 million views per month with only a few clips of standup and one comedic short film.

But once his family went into COVID-19 lockdown, Gaffigan turned to YouTube to share near daily livestreams of himself, his wife, and their five kids getting together for dinner. Then his joking descent into delusional chefdom began.

“Look, a lot of celebrity chefs, they’re not lucky. I have a wife that loves what I do,” he says in one of the latest episodes, during a somber grayscale segment called Chef Jim’s Corner. “She supports me. I think she’s still in awe. Sometimes I’ll be cooking and she’ll be cleaning and she’ll just look at me with this look of bewilderment. She’s so happy, she looks annoyed! But that’s the life of a celebrity chef.”

You can check out all current installments of Let’s Get Cookin’ here.