How to Hold a Baby – which delivers on its promise with 17 child-holding options including the baby Jesus and box of beers – has had 2.6m views. How to Make a Baby Clean the House has 1.6m. His videos now cover every aspect of parenting: from dressing a baby, changing a nappy and putting a baby to sleep, to How to Be a Kiwi Dad (“Always blow on the pie”).

That How to Dad bloke is 28-year-old Aucklander Jordan Watson. Mila, now three and a half, and Alba, one and a half, are his co-presenters. The project began – as such things often do – with a dopey idea. A mate at work had a baby on the way, so when his partner went out with their eldest daughter and left him with their four-month-old, Watson – a one-time landscaper who now works in TV production – grabbed his camera. He posted How to Hold a Baby online, tagged his friend on Facebook and went to bed.

The next morning, he says, the YouTube notifications kept arriving on his phone: 50k, 100k, 150k. So he made a few more videos – and now there are dozens. The How to Dad Facebook page is heading towards a million fans, a 160-page book is due out this week, and a web video series is being developed.

“I’m just a typical Kiwi dad. Kind of taken to the extreme in the DIY style,” says Watson, on a recent Sunday family walk, with the girls asleep in the stroller. “People have just connected with it.”

You can’t plan these viral videos, he says. “I just think if I find it funny and it’s a laugh for parents, it ticks the right boxes.”

There’s a fine tradition of the deadpan absurd in the New Zealand comic psyche, from Melbourne-based John Clarke’s 1970s character Fred Dagg, to Flight of the Conchords, to the films of Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople). For Watson, it started with Billy T James.

Growing up in Te Kauwhata in the Waikato dairy farming district south of Auckland, Watson’s Maori father – “a true MacGyver” who refuses to take anything to a professional to get fixed – had a collection of comic strip books. One series was by James, who is still regarded as one of the country’s greatest comedians 25 years after his death. He was famous for his unschooled but shrewd singlet-and-shorts characters. His father also had copies of the long-running farming comic strip Footrot Flats, which was subsequently made into a movie and musical.

But when Watson is making a video he’s not thinking of anyone other than that archetypal, rough-around-the-edges, DIY dad. “It’s ingrained in all of us now,” he says. “As soon as the camera turns on I must be just doing that classic Kiwi humour.” –

Read the full article in the Guardian here