Antoine Daniel

About

Antoine Daniel is a French Youtuber who hosts a show entitled What the Cut?! The show consists of humorous reviews of various media, including viral videos, and is quite popular on French Internet with over 2 million subscribers and 169 million views as of May 2015.^[2]

Origin

After several years working as an editor and music composer for video games and short movies^[8], Antoine Daniel started his review show What the Cut on March 1st, 2012. Antoine’s show keeps the format of RayWilliamJohnson’s Equal 3, consisting of a funny 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.

Collaboration with Mathieu Sommet

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.

Notable Episodes

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.

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”.