Guardian readers need no introduction to Tim Dowling. His column in Weekend magazine will either be the bit you always turn to or the bit you never look at, don't find funny and can't see the point of – possibly to the extent that you'll go online every single week to tell him so in the comments section. If you're the second sort, and reading this online, do feel free to skip ahead to the comments now and get good and purple. If you're the first, you'll whoosh through this book with cheery hoots of laughter and – for married men in middle age – twinges of fellow-feeling.

Dowling's a very fresh and smart writer, as he needs to be. Stories about machete massacres or ebola pandemics pretty much write themselves: writing about nothing much, week in, week out, is the real test. And as well as enraging those readers who think the very existence of first-person columns about domestic life an affront to their own seriousness, the authors of such columns run other risks. How do you write about a marriage without ending it? You owe the reader some truth; you owe your family some falsification. You owe the reader some embellishment; you owe your family some truth. Dowling picks his way deftly.

Books by funny magazine journalists with titles beginning "How to Be …" look like a selling proposition these days, and How to Be a Husband is a very journalistic book. It's essentially a collection of no-particular-order chapters about married life, very talky and jokey, each one resembling a long magazine feature – even down to numbered lists. There are the "Twelve Labours of Marriage", "Seven Ways in Which You Might Be Wrong", "Five Things You Can Actually Fix By Hitting Them With a Hammer", "The 40 Precepts of Gross Marital Happiness" ("actually, only 37 – three of these are bollocks – but I wanted a round number"; what feature writer hasn't been there?). As that suggests, there's some filler here – but sausages with a few breadcrumbs in are still good eating.

Dowling is an American who has been married for 20 years to a (usually unnamed) Englishwoman. They have three children and he plays the banjo and Googles himself a lot. You learn from this book's dedication, assuming he hasn't had the brass neck to dedicate it to his mistress, that his wife is called Sophie. She has, by the sounds of it, a sharp temper ("scares the shit out of me") and their relationship is of the argumentative type. In the Dowling household, for instance, they don't say "I love you" and "I love you too"; they say "You'll be sorry when I'm dead" and "I know". When they decided to get married, he reports, it was "with the resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods".

So how do you divide the domestic labour? How do you deal with young children? What happens when you suddenly have no money? How should you approach male personal grooming (mini-scoop: Dowling owns a pot of face polish he got when he stole David Walliams's goody bag at a showbiz party)? How much does your self-esteem rely on being the breadwinner? Are you having any sex? What do you need to have in the shed to be able to bodge 75% of DIY problems? All these questions and more are, well, if not decisively answered, then at least discussed.

Stereotypes are played around with, riffed off, and here and there amiably succumbed to. But Dowling righteously spikes some of the cliches of gender politics, especially the inanity of talking about "alpha males". A slightly misunderstood concept from the dominance hierarchies of wolves and chimps "doesn't mean much when applied to a species that shops at Uniqlo".

The second best thing about How to Be a Husband is that it's very funny. There's a proper laugh every couple of pages, and as often as not it arises from the texture of the situation, the tone of voice, the characters. He has a way, for instance, with deadpan little couplets of dialogue. "'I hate having dinner parties,' says my wife. 'You're not supposed to say that while everyone's still here,' I say, indicating our guests." When his wife has fallen drunkenly into a hedge and can't get out: "'I've lost a shoe in here,' she says. 'Stop struggling,' I say. 'You're damaging the hedge.'" Likewise with slightly off-key aphorisms: "With no seeming knack for childcare, I begin to take pride in the sheer stamina required to do it badly"; "If you don't want my impersonation of expertise, don't ask me questions I can't answer"; "As a husband, you're not only in charge of all the DIY jobs your wife can't do, you're also in charge of the ones that you can't do either."

But as well as being funny, which he has to be, Dowling is sometimes plangent – as in a chapter about his mother's death – and he is more often than not wise. A chapter called "How to Be Wrong" has some chewy stuff about the necessity, and the methods, for men to climb down in marital arguments. There's a serious book in here as well as a larky one. Marriage is hard work, he says. You're not always happy ("happy … is one of those absolute terms, like 'nit-free', that life has taught me to deploy with caution"). But as you fail at it, day by day, you are enlarged by each successive failure. You fail again. You fail better.

So if you don't get this stuff – or if you can't, for instance, see what's really, properly funny about "You're damaging the hedge" – pass on by. But if you do, there's pleasure and treasure here. Dowling writes, as I said, week in, week out, about nothing much. And in aggregate, of course – week in, week out – nothing much is nearly everything.

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