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When I saw that the video "Where the Hell is Matt?" had been posted on the website Gawker.com, I wanted to take it by the hand and lead it from the playground as if it were a child, small for its age. I felt as if the video were Oliver Twist and I became "leave the boy alone" Nancy.

I usually enjoy the cruel wit expressed by the commenters on Gawker - but I had seen the video. It had rendered me snarkless. I didn't want to see Matt mocked by the masters.

The video, also called "Dancing," shows 31-year-old Matt Harding dancing in 67 locations around the world.

Matt's dance is bad. It never changes. Sometimes he dances alone, but in the most endearing moments, he is joined by others. The effect is unsentimental, devoid of irony and something in the world's joyful response to Matt's gormless dancing reminded me of a travel moment of my own.

A while back, I was in Egypt and while staying by the Red Sea, my travelling companion and I struck up a conversation with a waiter.

We wanted to take my two children fishing and he assured us that he would take us the next night - "easy." He was going fishing anyway, he said.

But when we arrived at the dock, it became apparent from the irritated exchange between our waiter and the dozen men or so standing around the boat that he hadn't cleared our participation with his fishing companions.

They weren't keen to have two women and two children on board for their all-night fishing trip.

There was some terse discussion in Arabic between them. We offered to leave. Some money, the money we had paid the waiter to take us along, changed hands and we were taken aboard, unwelcomed, and remained so some hours.

I don't speak Arabic. My brother, then living in Egypt, has the gift of discerning and learning whichever six words are most needed in any given country, and he had had me learn the phrase "Shwai-ya, shawai-ya."

"It means 'slow down,' " he claimed, but he added it could also mean, "Keep doing what you are doing, but just a little less." Which makes it a fantastically sexy phrase.

It was certainly a phrase that produced charmingly random results: I shouted, "Shwai-ya, shawai-ya!" to my taxi driver once because he was, understandably perhaps, making alarmingly efficient use of the only open road I ever saw in Cairo. He nodded, turned down the radio and drove faster.

Anyway, I understood nothing that was spoken on the boat that night. The fishing was excellent. The sea and the night were precious and calm. I never had cause to say, "Shwai-ya, shawai-ya."

I could remember only the words for "thank you," which I said often.

I was uncomfortable, unable to determine the source of the lingering tension until, as our waiter faced out to the sea, one of the more irritable men turned to me, looked me straight in the eye and made a gesture as if to kick our waiter off the boat into the water.

It was at that exact moment that I realized that the song I'd been hearing on their transistor radio was an Arabic cover of Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da. And I realized as well what he was telling me: "The guy's a goof, that's all. We're all goofs."

I nodded. The tension dissolved and we fished until dawn.

I think that's the charm in "Dancing." Matt's a goof savant and everyone who dances with him and his 16.5 million viewers understand that and some global tension has been dissolved.

I needn't have feared for Matt regarding the comments on Gawker.

"It gave the back of my calves waves of goose bumps." I read.

"Obama-Harding '08!"

"Wow. Nothing snarky to say about this. Great video."

"God, I wanted to hate this. But halfway through I was grinning so hard I thought my head would explode."

I sent the video to my friend Cynical James.

"We all become Quakers," James wrote back 4½ minutes later.

I watched it again and I considered that bit of Yeats: "We must laugh and we must sing,/ We are blest by everything,/ Everything we look upon is blest."

Tabatha Southey is a writer based in Toronto.

Dancing with the Huli Wigmen Matthew Harding Vimeo