Extreme DPS Meme (Azel Cooking)
TL;DR · OriginKnown in English as "Azel Cooking," this meme comes from a single video by the Italian YouTuber Azel. The source is a roughly thirty-second video titled "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…
Origin
Known in English as "Azel Cooking," this meme comes from a single video by the Italian YouTuber Azel. The source is a roughly thirty-second video titled "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT," uploaded on July 24th, 2022, in which Azel swings his arms in wide motions while dancing to electronic music. It passed 500,000 views and 45,000 likes within three weeks.
Azel was already an active YouTuber before this. He began building an audience with reaction content on November 6th, 2021, and a video posted on February 26th, 2022 became his channel's most popular upload, drawing over 1.4 million views in seven months. What survived as a meme, though, was none of those — it was the dance clip.
Spread
The decisive turn was editing. From the late summer of 2022, videos spread on Facebook and YouTube in which cookware and utensils were composited onto Azel's arm movements so that he appeared to be cooking. The trick works because the original motions look like vigorous stirring and pounding, which lines up neatly with a kitchen scene.
- August 15th, 2022 — Facebook user Paul Johnley Evangelista posted an edit showing Azel making the Filipino dish chicken adobo, which drew more than 1 million views and 25,000 shares in three weeks
- August 24th, 2022 — an edit showing him making the Indonesian dish satay accumulated more than 18,000 reactions, 5,000 shares and over 400,000 views in two weeks
Notably, it broke out in Southeast Asia first, and localizing it around each country's signature dish was the engine of its spread. By late August 2022 the format had widened past cooking to edits depicting entirely unrelated activities such as gaming and household chores.
How it is used
- As an edit compositing him into any scene of handling something vigorously, to exaggerate it
- As a parody of cooking videos, especially localized around regional dishes
- As a reaction video for frantically busy handwork
- As a template, lifting the music and motion alone onto unrelated material
Sources
- Know Your Meme, "Azel Cooking" — the title, length and figures of the July 24th, 2022 original, Azel's channel history, and the accounts, dates and metrics of the August 15th and 24th, 2022 edits
