Rémi Gaillard French Comedian Born 1975 in Montpellier

Early life

Rémi Gaillard was born on 7 February 1975 in Montpellier, in the south of France. He is a French comedian who became known as a prankster, a YouTube creator and an animal rights activist. Football has been a lifelong interest, and he plays the game without a professional contract. He lost his job at a shoe shop, and with the free time that followed he began staging stunts in public places, filming them as he went.

Career

Gaillard shot his first sketch in 1999 with a friend in Montpellier. In 2001 he launched a website for his videos, and the project grew from there. His public breakthrough in France came in 2002. During the final of the Coupe de France, he walked onto the pitch dressed as a player from Lorient, joined in the winners' celebrations and was greeted by the then French president, Jacques Chirac. The stunt earned him attention in the national media.

Most of his sketches use a hidden camera, and he often wears outlandish costumes. Some films include a crowd of friends, which gives them the feel of a flash mob. Recurring ideas include dressing as animals and behaving as they would in public places, racing unsuspecting drivers while dressed as Mario in the style of Mario Kart, and staging comic encounters with parking officers and the police. Over the years he has also appeared as Pac-Man, as Santa Claus and in parodies of Rocky Balboa, and has posted football trick-shot videos, including one featuring the Brazilian footballer Ronaldo. More recent films often use large animal costumes such as a kangaroo and a bat. In one project he stayed locked in an animal cage for 87 hours to raise money for animal shelters. He has also dressed as a bomb and as a traffic enforcement camera.

His motto, a deliberate twist on a French proverb about blacksmiths, translates roughly as "It is by doing whatever that we become whoever."

His channel has more than 7 million subscribers, a count of 7.41 million being recorded in May 2025. His own website claims over 2.5 billion views across the web, and his channel's most-watched video, "Kangaroo", has around 90 million. In 2010 the English comedian Dom Joly suggested that some of Gaillard's sketches resembled those of his series Trigger Happy TV. Gaillard replied that many of Joly's pranks could equally be traced to earlier comedians, among them Buster Keaton.

He appeared in the 2011 documentary The Antics Roadshow, produced by the artist Banksy. His first full-length feature, N'importe qui, directed by Raphaël Frydman, was released in France on 5 March 2014; the same project appears in his listed credits under the title What the Fuck?. On 30 November 2023 he posted a video titled "EPILOGUE" in which he symbolically buried the logos of the social networks that carried his content. Viewers read this as a hint that he might step back from making videos.

Public roles

Alongside comedy, Gaillard is a campaigner for animal welfare. His cage stunt was staged to support animal shelters, and the animal costumes that run through much of his work form part of the same preoccupation. He has also turned up uninvited at sporting events, television game shows and political rallies, which became a trademark of his humour. His first sketch was shot in Montpellier in 1999.