Look At This Distinguished Gentleman

About

Look At This Distinguished Gentleman refers to a popular original sound on TikTok often used over videos of animals doing strange or funny things, originating from a video of a man talking about how distinguished his cat looks sitting in a lounge chair. The original video was uploaded in March 2020, and the sound has been used in over 90,000 videos on TikTok since. The phrase is also used as a catchphrase on sites like Reddit, and Twitter, often as a post title referring to cute animals.

Origin

On March 31st, 2020, TikToker^[1] @tigerkittychongles, aka Paul Provosty, posted a video of his cat sitting in a lounge chair somewhat like a person, saying, "Look at this distinguished gentleman. Look at the way he is sitting. Yes, very distinguished. Mm-hmm, I see," (shown below). The video gained over 2.9 million views in a year.

Spread

The original sound for Provosty's video went viral over the course of the year, mostly used over videos of animals sitting in funny ways or doing strange things (examples shown below).

On October 28th, 2020, TikToker @amy_kittens posted a video set to the sound, garnering over 9.6 million views in seven months (shown below, left). On February 18th, 2021, TikToker @winterpomsky posted a video using the sound, garnering over 8.6 million views in three months (shown below, right). These are the two most popular videos using the sound as of May 17th, 2021.

On April 11th, YouTuber NotboyXD posted a compilation of TikToks starting with one of these videos titled, "Look at this distinguished gentleman," garnering over 2.2 million views in a month (shown below).

Use As A Catchphrase

Outside of TikTok, variations of the phrase "Look At This Distinguished Gentleman" are often used online in post-text and captions to describe images of cute animals. This can be seen across most social media platforms, notably on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. One of the earliest examples of this was posted as the title to a cute cat picture to /r/aww^[2] on May 15th, 2020, by u/artboxcreationsinc, garnering over 2,900 upvotes in a year. The Faceboook^[3][4] page "Woof Woof," which posts images of cute dogs, often uses the phrase on posts (example shown below).

On January 21st, 2021, @smudge_lord, the account for Smudge the Cat posted a photo using the caption, garnering over 80,000 likes in four months (shown below).

On March 15th, 2021, 9Gag's Facebook^[5] page used the phrase on a photo of a cute dog, garnering over 32,000 reactions and 4,400 shares in two months (shown below). They shared the photo on Instagram^[6] the next day, garnering over 500,000 likes in the same span of time.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References