TORONTO - Canadian standup star Russell Peters seems to be juggling diaper duty and drollery with ease.

The Brampton, Ont.-raised actor-comic and his wife, Monica Diaz, had a baby girl in December and Peters says of fatherhood: "It's quite easy."

"I like it," he said in a phone interview to promote Tuesday's release of his new DVD, "The Green Card Tour, LIVE from the O2 Arena."

"She's a very good-looking baby. Mind you, I was a good-looking baby and that didn't work out in the end, so we can only hope, you know?" he said with a laugh.

Peters said Crystianna Marie Peters was born 2 1/2 months premature in December in Los Angeles, where he and Diaz have a home (they mostly split their time between Tinseltown and Las Vegas these days).

She weighed just one pound, 10 ounces and had to stay in hospital for 2 1/2 months.

Little Crystianna came early after Diaz developed preeclampsia, or pregnancy-induced hypertension.

Peters said Diaz didn't know she had the condition until she started feeling ill at a Michael Buble concert.

"At the Buble concert we just thought she ate a bad pretzel," the Toronto-born funnyman recalled over the line as he shaved his face with an electric razor at his home in Woodbridge, Ont.

"She was like, 'I feel really sick.' I'm like, 'Ah, come on, I want to go the after-party.' And Buble was like, 'You comin', bud?' and I'm like, 'Ah, no, Patty Pretzel over here is feeling sick."'

The next day the couple went to the hospital, where doctors discovered Diaz's blood pressure was alarmingly high and induced labour.

Peters said he was surprisingly calm during the ordeal.

"I had nothing to compare it to," he explained. "Everyone is like, 'You're so calm,' and I'm like, 'Well I don't know, right? I mean, she's in the hospital. It's better for her in the hospital than at my house. ... I can't keep bread fresh, how am I going to keep a baby alive?"'

"The Green Card Tour, LIVE from the O2 Arena" features footage from Peters's two-night stint at the famed London venue in front of 30,000 fans.

It's his third DVD and it sees the outspoken performer, who is of Anglo-Indian ancestry, doing what he does best -- wisecracking on race and culture, and making fun of brave fans sitting in the front rows.

"That's actually one of my favourite things to do," he said of his audience banter.

"I think a lot of times people think I've planted people too, which always freaks me out. I'm like, 'Who would plant somebody in their audience?' It doesn't make any damn sense to me."

Peters hired Michael Buffer, the famed announcer for professional boxing and wrestling matches, to record an intro for his onstage entrance at the O2 Arena show.

"It cost money, but I got him," said Peters, who used to box himself. "It did cost a pretty penny. It wasn't cheap."

The DVD, which is also available in Blu-ray, includes a "clean remix" of the show, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and deleted scenes.

Peters said it was his idea to included a "clean remix," as he felt he spewed out too many profanities in the show.

"I think that's my biggest beef with the DVD is that I swore too much that night," he said.

"I was offended by myself. I guess because I was in a bad mood. I was just swearing for some damned reason."

On June 14, the 60-minute broadcast version of "The Green Card Tour LIVE from the O2 Arena" will be released on iTunes Canada.

Peters, who recently had a prominent role in the acclaimed film "Source Code" with Jake Gyllenhaal, can also be seen in three other movies slated for theatrical release this year.

"Breakaway," a Sikh ice-hockey film set in an Indo-Canadian community in suburban Toronto, will likely come out in September, he said. Then there's "New Year's Eve," the star-studded sequel to "Valentine's Day," and the film "Ansiedad" with Eva Mendes.

As with "Source Code," Peters said his character in "Breakaway" is a bit of a brute while his part in "Ansiedad" is more serious.

For "New Year's Eve," he went against his rule of adopting an Indian accent onscreen because it felt right for the character.

"Garry Marshall wanted me to do the accent, which I've always been dead set against," said Peters, who revealed in his memoir, "Call Me Russell," last fall that some of his TV-development deals haven't panned out because producers wanted him to "act more Indian."

"So he was like, 'Look, do the accent and then in the end of the movie we'll reveal that you don't have an accent and that you just did it to get close to (the character played by) Sofia Vergara,"' he continued.

"And I was like, 'Well that makes sense, I can do that.' Now if they edit that out, then I'm ... dead in the water. ... so it's a gamble, really. Let's just hope for the best on that one."