Dad Goes Viral After Recreating His Daughter’s Selfies So She Would ‘Tone It Down’
One dad found an unusual way to make his daughter reconsider the selfies she was sharing online – by recreating them himself in painstaking and increasingly ridiculous detail.
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Chris “Burr” Martin, from Spokane, Washington, became an online hit after copying the poses of his daughter Cassie and posting his own versions on social media.
The warehouse inventory worker and part-time comedian initially started the joke after deciding one of Cassie’s selfies was a little too provocative.
Rather than simply telling her to stop, the father-of-three decided to make his point in a way she wasn’t likely to forget.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that should be toned down,’” Chris explained to PEOPLE.
“There’s too much pressure for everybody to look sexy on the Internet. It’s such a weird thing: Teenage girls are always posting these selfies to boost their egos, then they’ll get crude comments and regret it. But what do they do? They post again. So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to make a point here.’ ”
And he certainly committed to it.
His recreations have involved everything from tattoos and a pierced navel to duct-tape eyebrows, Goldilocks-style curls and even a crown featuring close-up pictures of his own face.
Chris doesn’t warn Cassie when another recreation is coming either. Instead, he takes the picture and posts it directly to her social media as a surprise.
“Probably my favorite is the one where I imitated her pose with her hand on her chin, showing a tattoo of a hammerhead shark,” he said. “I did the same thing, but drew Jabberjaw from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.”
The joke has since become much bigger than the original father-daughter exchange, with Chris attracting 154,000 Instagram followers.
“I wondered if it might get old — I didn’t want to get to the point where I was pathetic for attention,” he said. “But since I started posting again more regularly, I’ve experienced a resurgence. People seem to love it, and that makes me happy.”
Cassie has embraced the joke.
“I know there’s a chance he’s going to imitate it,” she said of posting a new selfie, “but it’s always a lot of fun. Probably the funniest thing is when he draws on a tattoo and it’s still there the next day because he couldn’t remove it.”
More importantly for Chris, his original plan appears to have had an impact.
“Cassie has toned down her own selfies a little bit,” he said, “and she’s now more aware of the impact of them. So now, I guess I’m still doing this more in fun because everybody seems to get such a kick out of it.”
The photos have also prompted messages that Chris never expected.
“A mom with a daughter with autism emailed to say that they both looked forward to them and it always made their day brighter,” he said, “and a man who had lost his daughter told me that my selfies made him laugh for the first time in a long while. It’s wonderful to know that this is ringing deeper than just a stupid thing that I did.”
The pair have even started getting recognised while shopping or visiting the cinema in Spokane.
“People will approach me and say, ‘Are you that girl? The girl with the funny ‘selfie’ dad?’” Cassie said, “and when I tell them, ‘Yes,’ they always start laughing. I haven’t met anyone yet who doesn’t think my dad’s hilarious.”
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