Describing exactly what Kira Coviello, aka Honest 2 Betsy, does in her viral videos is a bit of a challenge. Well, she dresses up and listens to old records. And she may sing and play along, or may just react. And it’s hilarious and wonderful.

“I think of them as little, 60 second silent movies,” she says in a Zoom interview from her Pennsylvania home. “I’m a big fan of Buster Keaton style physical comedy, there’s a lot you can do with just your face. To me, Betsy is a repressed housewife who is trying to make it as a musician. She keeps getting all sorts of gigs, and things go awry. Or sometimes she’s just in her house cooking and listening to music, and it always takes a wild turn she doesn’t expect, so she has to cope through her vices, like chugging from a flask. She’s loosely based on my dear departed mother, who was never seen without her red lipstick.”

A lifelong dancer and actor, Coviello actually pulled Betsy out of a rough time in her life a couple of years ago. “I lost a job I’d been at for a long time. I’d always worked in theater and dance, and never identified as a stay-at-home mom. So I lost my identity as one does, and started making a joke about that to my friends. I started sending them ridiculous videos of myself as a tradwife from the 1950’s, and they were highly amused by that. So I thought that if I put them online, maybe I could at least sell some of my crochet crafts.”

It all came together when she brought vintage vinyl into the mix— mostly hitting Betsy with bawdy or socially incorrect novelty songs and blues from the ‘40s and ‘50s. “The novelty songs worked their way into my routine like a cannon — As soon as I found those it blew up overnight. The first song I used was ‘Shave ‘Em Dry’ (a raunchy 1935 blues by Lucille Bogan) which is absolutely filthy, it just blew my mind. Now people send me songs that they want to see a skit to. I speak in some of the videos, but those aren’t usually the ones that go viral.”

One key figure in her universe is Tom Lehrer, the musical satirist and local hero who died last July. Though she never got to meet Lehrer, she did get to know some of his associates and has been to his Harvard-area home to leave flowers. “I heard ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ and was madly in love for life. When he died it felt like I was losing a grandparent. I knew he saw some of what I’m doing and didn’t tell me to stop, so there’s that.”

You may wonder how these minute-long videos translate into a full live show, and you can find out at Passim on Thursday, Jan. 8.  She’ll be joined by Bronwyn Bird and Lolly Hopwood, her main collaborators from the videos; and Boston theater/comedy friends Matt DeAngelis and Christine Dwyer. “It translates into chaos,” she says. “It’s fun to do Betsy’s voice, which is different from mine. She plays a lot of instruments along with her friends, there’s dancing, there’s my Tom Lehrer puppet. It’s a modern vaudevillian spectacular.”

She hopes to develop the show further and bring it to more theaters and festivals. “Performing in front of an audience has always been my home, and I love the improvisation that goes into a live show. But if everybody decides they’re sick of me, that’s cool; I’ll go back to crocheting. I think I picked the best, most rad way to have a midlife crisis.”