Mathieu Sommet / Antoine Daniel

About

Mathieu Sommet and Antoine Daniel are a couple of French Youtubers (who are hosting their respective show, both consisting of humoristic reviews from media and viral videos, in a similar style to RayWilliamJohnson’s“Equal 3”. Their respective show, known as “Salut Les Geeks” (“hello the geeks”, sometimes simply referred as SLG) and “What the Cut!?” became very famous on the French internet, the first one gathering 1.3 million subscribers and 166 million views on May 2015^[1], while the latter one gathered over 2 million subscribers and 169 million views in the same time^[2].

Online History

Mathieu Sommet

Origin

After participating to the production of several short movies with the association “Kick Production” during the late 2000’s^[3]Mathieu Sommet started his own Youtube Channel in march 2011, when he uploaded the first episode of SLG, simply entitled “Pilot Episode”. The show consists of a humoristic review of three viral internet videos.

He admitted in an interview^[4] that his goal was to adapt the concept of RayWilliamJohnson’s show to a French audience. Indeed, adaptations of English-speaking internet shows for a French-speaking audience were notably popular, with various very successful examples like Joueur du Grenier, the French equivalent to The Angry Video Game Nerd and the Nostalgia Critic, who started his show in 2009.

However, Matheu Sommet managed to keep a strong differentiation to the original stuff, introducing several memorable characters and sometimes humoristic musical segments, which became an important part of the show’s popularity ^[5].

Spread

The show kept a quite confidential audience during its first year, but gained a notable increase in popularity in july 2012, after Mathieu appeared as a cameo on LinkstheSun’s show “Point Culture”^[6], which was way more popular at this time.

Overall, since its creation, the show spawned 96 episodes over five seasons, and four special musical videos, for the show’s anniversary. The most popular one, entitled “Internet j’suis ton enfant” (“Internet I’m your child”) posted in march 2014 for the third anniversary of SLG, became the most popular video on the channel, gaining over 3,000,000 views on May 2015.

However, since the middle of season 3, the show’s tone started to change, as Mathieu started to focus more on the satire and caricature of the different social aspects of the videos he reviewed, at the point that a part of his fanbase accused him of turning into a left-wing Social justice warrior, which he partially admitted in a Q&A video^[7].

Plot and Characters

Warning: may contain spoilers

The main character cast, all played by Mathieu, includes:

• The Boss, a sexually perverted man always represented wearing a black suit vest, a dark shirt, sunglasses and with a cigarette in the mouth.
• The Geek (sometimes referred as “the kid”), a caricature of a virgin immature child wearing a baseball cap.
• The Hippie, caricature of a stoner.
• Master Panda (“Maître Panda” in French) sometimes simply referred as The Panda, a cynical and snarky character always wearing a panda costume, in charge of the musical segment (called “l’instant panda”) of the show since the beginning of season 4.
• The Professor, a mad scientist wearing a bow tie, in charge of the humoristic Q&A segment of the show until the end of season 3.

However, at the end of season 4, Mathieu added a side storyline to the show, revealing that all those characters were in fact just part of his schizophrenic personality, building a plot during season 5, centered on Mathieu trying to escape a mysterious psychiatrist.

Notable popular episodes

Antoine Daniel

Origin

After several years working as an editor and music composer for several video games and short movies^[8], Antoine Daniel started his review show What the Cut on March 1st, 2012, almost one year after the premiere of SLG. Antoine’s show keeps the format of RayWilliamJohnson’s Equal 3, consisting of a humoristic review of 3 videos from the weird part of Youtube, but in a very different tone and style than SLG. Several months later, he admitted he wasn’t aware of SLG when he started the production of What the Cut, but he kept working on it anyways, accentuating the difference between the two shows.

Spread

During the following years, Antoine Daniel gained a larger popularity than Mathieu Sommet. On May 2015, his channel had more than 2,000,000 subscribers. Aside from his 36 main episodes, he also produced several country-themed special episodes, focused on viral videos from particular countries, like Japan, India, Quebec and Russia, the latter one being the most popular video on his channel with more than 7,800,000 views on May 2015.

The show

Since its beginning, What the Cut adopted a radically different style than SLG, the first focusing on reviews of weird and bizarre videos, while the latter one focusing on analysis of viral or controversial stuff. Moreover, the tone of What the Cut appeared to many French viewers more prone to absurd humor^[9], and full of references to popular internet memes such as YOLO, horse head mask (which he keeps using as a censorship image while reviewing NSFW videos) and (more recently) MLG montage parodies.

The show counts several absurd recurring characters including:

* Richard, the sexually perverted talking plushie dog
* Samuel, the talking fan
* The ”Murderer Squirrel from the deep Nothingness”, aka. The Squirrel-Man, starting to appear on episode 34 and turning into an antagonist during the opening cut-scene of episode 36.

Notable Episodes

Joint Projects

During the last years Antoine Daniel and Mathieu Sommet are frequently doing joint works, for conventions or for some special events. On January 18th, 2015, they both starred in a video entitled “Super Crayon” (Super pencil) in which they reacted, with other French youtubers, to the Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attacks, showing their support to the victims.

Fandom

Their Popularity granted them an important fanbase on social media (625,000 likes on facebook for SLG^[10] 489,000 for What the Cut^[11]. This fanbase generated a wide range of fan made works on DeviantArt but also fan made videos and parodies on Youtube.

During a live joint conference on stage they gave at the 2014 Polymanga convention in Montreux, Switzerland^[12], Mathieu and Antoine admitted they also found several shippingfanfictions involving them.

Related Memes

Eddy Malou

Eddy Malou is a citizen of Kinshasa, in Democratic Republic of Congo, who became infamous on the French internet after one of his videos featured in episode 25 of What the Cut, released in April 2013^[13]. In the said video, He held a hilariously nonsensical speech, using random and made-up words and going totally off-topic. The video of Eddy Malou spawned several parodies, photoshopped images and remixes made by French netizens.

C’est Normal en Russie

C’est normal en Russie (“It’s normal in Russia”) is a catchphrase quoted several times by Antoine Daniel in his Russian video themed special episode of What the Cut, in order to react to several unusual situations (a tank crossing a highway, an old man hopping in a bus wielding an assault rifle, etc…). The catchphrase became popular on French social media as a reaction to anything weird happening in faraway countries, in a similar manner to “Meanwhile in X”

YOLO Tank

YOLO Tank is a Youtube fad consisting of several musical samples covering a dash-cam footage of a Russian tank crossing a road. This fad emerged as a reaction to the Russian-themed special episode of What the Cut^[14], after Antoine Daniel commented on said footage that he had never seen anything that badass in his life (cue to said footage with a flashing red “#YOLO” caption, hence the name of the fad) and that “any music could fit to this video”.

“T’en as trop pris, gros!”

“T’en as trop pris, gros!” (can be translated as “you took too much of it, dude!”) is a catchphrase quoted several times throughout the show by the “hippie” character from SLG, when the stuff reviewed appears exceptionally weird, implying it was made under influence of drugs. This catchphrase became popular on the French internet as a reaction Image.

Search interest

External references