"You can criticise anything you want about what I do," he says at one point when I ask if he thinks comedy is something that should stand up to critical review. "Just like I can criticise anything that I want about what you do."

He grapples with his craft, wonders aloud, and never pushes back. He takes in every question and considers it seriously. He dismisses nothing. He tells jokes and reveals trade secrets for winning an audience over in the first few lines.

"A lot of towns don't like the closest town to them," he says. "So, it's always a great one to say: 'Oh, we drove through somewhere today - what a shit-hole', or when I was in Rockhampton: 'It's great to be in the beef capital of Australia, a town full of beef, country people, and heaps of meth'. Everyone loves that. If you can hit on something local, they're on your side straight away."

Butterfield stretches out on the couch in his two-storey townhouse at Charlestown. He's wearing track pants and a tee-shirt and has his feet up on the coffee table. He's hospitable and friendly. He makes coffee, introduces the dogs, and runs through a tour of the house.

"I vacuumed the floors before you came," he says at one point. "Mum came over and helped me clean the sink."

In a spare room upstairs, filled with shoes and the odd-ends of domestic life, there's a painting of him, suited and full-bearded, leaning against the wall in a golden frame. A friend of his had made it in the style of the Kramer Portrait. He says he will hang it when he and his partner have the right house for it. A second room, with a video light and computer desk, is the studio where he records for his YouTube channel.

As he gives his tour, there is an almost imperceptible sense of the mercury shifting. When he is in his studio, standing in front of the cabinet of kitsch and memorabilia - some of which he collects from his live shows, like the three or four bottles of whiskey, and other pieces, like the home-forged bowie knife, are gifts from his fans - his attention shifts. Just like that, he is not talking to the wall and the computer desk, he's not talking to the camera, he's talking to the thousands of viewers who watch each of his videos. In this room, his attention is for them and they feel as if they have all of it.

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The dogs - an adopted greyhound and whippet padding around the living room - know how to get his attention. He lets them into the yard when they get rowdy and lets them back inside a moment later when they're making eyes through the door.

"They rule the roost around here," he says. "My partner loves greyhounds. She had whippets growing up and loves rescuing animals."

Rosie, the older greyhound, was adopted from a rescue on the Central Coast. Little Foot, the gangly and excitable puppy, is the new addition. He arrived around five weeks ago.

"They've been a game changer," Butterfield says. "You hear about YouTubers and comedians with depression and stuff like that. I think it is just because they're lonely. They have these massive ups where you have a crowd of a thousand people, and then you come home the next day and it's just an eerie silence."

Butterfield's routine is wrapped around his comedy. He writes two days each week, trains for five, films on Wednesdays and edits Thursdays and Fridays.

"For all the money in the world, I work for YouTube," he says, though his revenue comes from several places. Crowdfunding helped him make a living as he found his way online, eventually giving way to monetised content as he established his audience, supplemented by merchandise sales and live performances for which he regularly travels around the country.

After he reached 100,000 subscribers, YouTube sent him a framed silver certificate that he keeps in his studio, and the contact details of a handler for creators who can help solve tech issues, and who Butterfield can appeal to if his videos are removed.

In the past few months, his channel has reached more than 975,000 subscribers. He uses each video to promote his live shows, his tour, and his social media channels in equal measure. When he reaches one million subscribers, he gets a bigger plaque.

"I've dug holes, thrown out shit from a dirty building site. I've done all that rubbish," he says. "I hated it. The reason I do this job is so that I don't have to have a real job - that's number one. Number two is that I like doing stand-up."

His first appearance on stage was at the Burwood Bowling Club during a fundraiser for the Dudley Magpies, where comedian Andy Saunders was booked to perform. Butterfield's father, Tony, a founding Newcastle Knights player who signed to the team in 1988 and went on to a 229-game career, including the 1997 ARL Premiership, had tipped off Saunders that his then-teenage son was interested in comedy.

Partway through the set, the young Butterfield was called up from the crowd.

"I was terrified," he says. "I had one joke. It was about Ray Warren commentating porn," he smiles. "I did it. It worked out. It gave me the confidence to think I could do this."

Butterfield grew up playing football with the Magpies, but he scoffs at the mention of it. He describes himself as an intermediate player. "You would put me on the field," he says in one of his videos. "But you wouldn't expect me to do much."

He now trains at a mixed martial arts gym with a focus on jiu-jitsu.

"If you're scared of something, the best way to take it on is to put your head straight into it," he says. "If you can do one joke on stage and it's yours - you've written it, and you've practiced it and you don't need a bit of paper to remember it - then what's stopping you from doing 50, or 100, or a whole career?"

Butterfield saw an opportunity to build an audience on the internet, but he skirts carefully around calling himself a YouTuber. He missed out on performing live at a club in New Zealand, he says, because the promoters did not stage 'YouTube comedians'.

"I'm not some dude doing it on a whim to make money," he says. "Some people find an audience on YouTube and then go to stand-up to make money. I started doing stand-up and then thought I should get on YouTube so people know me - so that I can do more stand-up."

Butterfield created his channel in 2012 - the same year he made his Facebook page. He describes his audience online as 'slightly more male' than at his live shows, which he says are evenly divided among men and women. His audience exploded after he published a response to a video titled '10 Reasons Not to Visit Australia'.

"For a year, I did two videos every week and no one cared," he says. "And then, after one video, it exploded. I went from 1000 subscribers to 150,000 in three days."

Butterfield knows what his audience likes, what they have come to see, and he has some idea of how far he can push his experimentation, but he says there is still some guess work around how his videos are promoted through the site. The pattern is predictable, but not definitive.

"Everything is closely guarded," he says. "Everything is referred to as 'the algorithm', which means anything. And even people whose job it is to work for YouTube - to create content - we just don't know.

Facebook and Instagram often delete his content, he says. "I've just finished serving a 30-day ban on Facebook.

"YouTube is my boss, but we don't have a guide to what works and what doesn't."

Butterfield describes his work as a business - the cultivation of a personal brand. His videos regularly collect more than 20,000 views in the first 15 minutes online. He's unhappy to have not reached 100,000 views in the first six hours. But he does not think of himself as a celebrity or as a 'YouTuber'.

His channel and his social media pages represent the character on which he has built his success. Online, he's loud, crude and abrasive. He pits himself as an outsider - a challenger of anything he calls "the mainstream".

He attacks feminists, progressives, vegans and cyclists. He riles and snipes other YouTubers, and calls out social commentators and celebrities. If they pick fights with him, he responds quickly and theatrically. He's gladiatorial and combative - the internet is his colosseum.

"I'm trying to get someone to bite," he says. "And if they bite, then we have a series. Sometimes it is genuine outrage. Other times, I'm just laughing at someone."

Butterfield has engaged with a handful of YouTubers over the past year, including eccentric small-time creators like vegan activist and cyclist Harley Johnstone, known online as DurianRider, and Canadian bodybuilder Richard Burgess, who goes by VeganGains. Both of them have posted rants and often bizarre tirades in response to Butterfield's online videos.

He tackles complex social issues with a scathing and controversial style. He's critical of body-positive celebrities, like US model Tess Holliday, and accuses them of promoting unhealthy lifestyles.

He attacks commentary on gender wage discrepancies, and often returns to wheelhouse jabs at vegans and cyclists.

"It's a character," he says. "That's the scoop. It's the comedy version of me. It's the person you pay to see on stage, not the person who sits here with his dogs. I don't get angry about anything here, because that's my job upstairs."

Butterfield says his audience knows his act is in character, but fans are often surprised when they meet him offline. The nature of his brand - the regularity with which he posts - means he's always looking for material.

"You have to be always on," he says. "Particularly when you're in the public eye. When I'm walking around Charlestown, if I say hello to someone - if they are younger people, 14 to 18, I'll carry on a little bit and give them a bit of a show."

"A lot of people, when they meet me in person, that's when they realise it's a character. They say: 'you're so polite', And I say: 'yeah, that's me'."

In 2018, Butterfield was banned from Facebook after posting a video comparing New Zealand to Australia. The clip was removed amid allegations it contained hate speech, which Butterfield insisted was only a series of jokes. The clip caught attention from New Zealand's The Project, and he was invited on air for an interview.

After the televised segment, Butterfield posted a response on his YouTube channel. He works through the interview, adding commentary and jabs at how he was portrayed, liberally splicing in promotions for his social media and upcoming tour.

He returns to a similar strategy in most of his videos. When he engages another creator or comedian, or posts responses, his performances - and often those of his rivals - are laced with promotions. In one stoush with VeganGains, Burgess, after mentioning Butterfield's tour and showing a clip of countries where he would be performing, challenges him to a mixed martial arts bout to settle their differences. He suggests the pair could sell tickets to the event.

"He keeps challenging me to fights," Butterfield says. "If we did a fight, I would have it in Australia and I would take a majority of the tickets. I've been knocked out for free playing footy. So, if the price was right, I would do it."

Butterfield says he has no interest in speaking with Burgess offline, and that he genuinely dislikes and disagrees with him on a number of issues. But when the creator was facing a mental health struggle, he reached out privately.

"I messaged him once," Butterfield says. "He was having a bad time with depression. I messaged him just to wish him all the best."

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Butterfield courts controversy offline just as he does so in the virtual space. In April, during a set at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, he made reference to the Holocaust and, in an email after the performance, told an offended Jewish audience member 'if you can't stand the heat get out of the oven'. The report denouncing his behaviour spread rapidly around the world.

"That particular article was interesting," Butterfield says. "The lady who wrote it was the crime reporter. She emailed me and said I had two hours to respond to it or they would make an article about it. I thought: 'bring it. Let's go'. I went up 30,000 subscribers that week."

Butterfield says that his comedy is not intended to be harmful, that he is playing a character, and that he markets himself on his alternative style.

"If I tell a joke about a horrible tragedy that happened, and someone says, 'I was greatly affected by that horrible event and your joke reminded me of it,' then, of course, I would say I'm sorry for that reminder," he says. "That was not the intention. But we're talking about humour here. If you've said something with the intention of making people laugh - that's why you've said it - then you can't apologise for that stuff. You may as well own it. Double down. That's what I did - I put a 10-minute bit about it in the show."

He argues his combative style is what his audience pays to see.

A promotional clip for for his new show, Why So Serious?, which he will perform at the Civic Theatre on September 7, opens with an edited sequence on his most publicised clashes.

"They know I'm just being an ass," he says. "That is why you go to the show. That's what you get when you watch my videos - you know I'm going to be pretty mean about someone. But then you see how the internet reacts. I get a death threat a week. People say I'm going to come and kill your dogs and shit like that. The internet is a horrible place.

"When you look into things too far, you take the comedic power away from it. Why do I say horrible things? I just sort of do. Not everything I say on stage is some kind of horrible, heinous thing. A lot of it is really light-hearted."

Butterfield was diagnosed with epilepsy when he turned 21, and shortly after began having panic attacks. As he struggled with his anxiety, he wondered what effect it would have on his comedy.

"I had a lot of issues with anxiety," he says. "I thought that the money, the fame, the recognition, the kind words from strangers - that it would fix it. But it doesn't. It doesn't change anything. And I think it is good that it doesn't change anything. I think what people like about me is that I am myself. As soon as that changes, it becomes really detrimental to the whole way that I promote my career - the stand-up and the videos."

Butterfield grew up watching his dad play for years in the spotlight of the Newcastle Knights. It was experience he says helped him face the challenges of finding success as an alternative entertainer.

"It gives you the opportunity to know that you can do the impossible," he says. "I didn't want to do something normal. I didn't want to just get a normal job. I did that for some time just to pay the bills when I was 18 and 19, but I've always wanted to take the road less travelled."

Even as his audience gathers around him in the thousands, there is a sense Butterfield is still experimenting with form. He is unfinished and constantly striving - always leaning more on his potential as an entertainer than he does on his record as one.

He hints at the prospect of a podcast in the works - the first episode of which, he expects to publish next week. An early line-up of high-profile Newcastle personalities will appear as guests including Mark Hughes, Kurt Fearnley and Adam Greentree. He hopes the longform interviews will bring a new complexity to his character online.

"You can't get stuck in your ways," he says. "People move on so quickly. Don't get me wrong - if you do something horrible, you can ruin everything. But if you want to test something - if I wanted to put up a vlog - then I'll do it and if it does shit numbers then, 'oh well'. There's another video coming out tomorrow.

"I can be that explosive, outrageous person in a video - that's just a way to make people laugh. But I could easily go upstairs and do a video about a certain topic and speak like this the entire time and people would watch it. I know that because people have learnt to trust me. That's how the podcast will work.

"When I started doing videos, the idea was to do what works, and what brings people in. Then, they can trust you, and then you can expose them to more versions of yourself."

Butterfield's comedy exists on a series of carefully tensioned contradictions. He's the enigmatic acrobat walking the wire between impossible heights and the threat of falling from them - an expert at adaptation. He is the smiling and ruthless comedic assassin who tidies his house before visitors arrive.

In one of his most recent videos, he reads aloud and reacts to comments from viewers attacking his character online. He's called a misogynist, a 'wannabe', a disgrace - he's told to "die in a ditch", to kill himself. He reads them all laughing.

"Would you be mad if I died and it wasn't in a ditch?" he jabs down the lens.

With a minute left on the video, Butterfield - wearing a tee shirt for the mental health support group Livin - suddenly pivots. In a few words, the video titled 'Comedian Reads Mean Comments' has transitioned to a message about mental health services and how to access them.

"I've enjoyed making this video," he says. "But before I go, make sure that you don't tell people to go and kill themselves. I know it's all fun and games on the internet but once you start putting shit on people, it does affect them.

"If you need help," he says. "Go to your doctor. Book-in tomorrow."

The dogs are getting restless. The afternoon is stretching on and Rosie is standing by the door gradually gathering up Butterfield's attention again with subtle and expert cues. The puppy, Little Foot, is bounding clumsily around the living room.

"Rosie will go for a walk in the morning for 10 or 20 minutes," Butterfield says. "Any longer than that and she has had enough. She sleeps all day.

"A lot of people freak out because they wear muzzles. There used to be a lot of live baiting in the industry. People would walk the dogs, and they would see a rabbit or smaller dog and they would go it because they were trained to chase those types of animals. I used to walk Rosie with the muzzle and people would react thinking she was a bad dog, but she's a princess."

Rosie has spent the past two hours curled up on a pillow by the window. Little Foot could not decide where or how to relax.

"He will be the same as Rosie," Butterfield says. "He's just a puppy, so he's running around. We got Rosie and it was the best thing I ever did. My partner eventually talked me into getting Little Foot a couple of weeks ago. Apart from losing a few DVD cases and a couple of shoes - a couple of accidents on the carpet - it has been alright.

"He's a good boy. He just carries on like a pork chop."

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