BROOKEAVERICK

Once upon a time — specifically April 2020, the first pandemic spring — a preschool teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs sat down, opened her childhood diary, and accidentally broke the internet. That teacher was Brooke Averick. The diary entry was mortifying. The internet was delighted.

Brooke grew up in the Main Line area of suburban Philadelphia, the kind of place where you attend synagogue and can absolutely, definitely embarrass yourself at your bat mitzvah. She studied early childhood education at Boston University and spent years shaping young minds in Pennsylvania classrooms. Nothing in that biography would suggest she was about to become a force of comedic nature with 68 million TikTok likes.

When COVID hit and schools closed, Brooke — home, bored, and apparently utterly without self-preservation instinct — started posting on TikTok under the handle @ladyefron. The name was her childhood email address. Why ladyefron? Because Mrs. Efron was taken. Her Zac Efron obsession — ignited the moment she saw a High School Musical commercial at a cousin's sleepover and immediately felt, in her own words, "nauseous" — had officially entered the internet age.

Her first video: reading from her childhood diary. It went viral. She quit teaching shortly after. And just like that, the preschool classroom's loss was the entire internet's gain.

By the end of 2020, Paper magazine had named her one of its 20 "Paper People" of the year — a list of the most notable TikTok creators of the moment. She was 24 years old and had traded lesson plans for story time of an entirely different kind.

What makes Brooke Averick different from every other creator who went viral during lockdown? She has no niche. No gimmick. No viral dance, no cooking hack, no lifestyle aesthetic. What she has is an apparently bottomless reserve of true stories, an instinct for comic timing that most stand-ups would trade a kidney for, and a complete absence of self-censorship.

Her TikTok format — quick story times, comment reply videos, the occasional genuinely chaotic home movie from 2003 — sounds simple. But the execution is the magic. Brooke has a gift for setting up a story, holding on the beat just long enough, and then delivering the punchline with the casual confidence of someone who has made peace with every mortifying thing that has ever happened to them.

Then came Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast, which she launched in early 2022 with Connor Wood — a former housemate from Common Room L.A. — on TMG Studios, the network founded by Cody Ko and Noel Miller. It became one of the biggest comedy podcasts of the year, racking up over 30 million YouTube views, 20 million audio downloads, and 117 million views across TikTok and Instagram Reels. It was named Adweek's Best Comedy Podcast of 2024. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter both came calling.

Her solo pod, Obsessed with Brooke Averick (launched January 2024), goes deeper into her fandoms — Harry Styles, Broadway, her enduring dream of playing a corpse on Criminal Minds next to Matthew Gray Gubler. It's the show for people who can't like things a normal amount. Her words. Our personality.

And now: a novel. Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It, a romantic comedy about a woman navigating intimacy anxiety, published by Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House) as part of a multi-book deal. Releasing May 26, 2026. Tour dates to follow.