Translation: - "Hey Vincent, it's me, is Denise there?" - "Eh, no, only Melvin and Ruud are here." - "Oh, do me Melvin then." - "Do it yourself, I'm straight."
Kakhiel is a Dutch internet phenomenon, who has gained a cult status with his corny edits of stock photos, which are often in the comics format.
Identity
The true identity of the person behind the Kakhiel persona has remained a secret. All that is known is that he studied at the Willem de Kooning Art Academy in Rotterdam, worked at an advertising agency in Amsterdam, and was in his early twenties when he started posting his photo edits on the hip hop message board HiphopInJeSmoel. The success prompted him to launch a site, and after 2010 his work quickly went viral through social media. By 2017, he reached over 300,000 people through Facebook, 150,000 through Twitter and nearly 400,000 through Instagram. The artist could even quit his daytime job and became Kakhiel full time. His only public appearances have been in a spacesuit.
Translation: "O.K., that's it. Take off that wig. We all know you're Sandra Bullock." - "Huh?"
Style
Kakhiel picks free stock photos from the internet - often overacted happy family shots or pictures with elderly people - and adds balloons with bizarre, corny or coarse dialogue and wordplay. These are presented in single panels, but also regularly in sequential images, and in some occasions with the same image used over and over again. The intentional shitty lay-out of the balloons and the texts with little to no punctuation and casual spacing all add to the hilarity of the gimmick.
In later years, Kakhiel has been mostly posting mailed-in screenshots from strange Whatsapp conversations, awkward customer/seller contact on auction sites and weird social media reactions.
- Translation: "Do you have monsters underneath your bed every now and then?"
- "No, but I do next to my bed."
Success
Typical Kakhiel puns like "oke doei" ("okay bye") and "haha doei" ("haha bye") have become well-known internet catchphrases and have been for sale on T-shirts and other merchandising. Kakhiel's photo edits eventually also found their way to print media, with a regular photo comic in Playboy magazine (2012) and book collections at the publishing house Lebowski ('Doei' in 2013, and 'Dat wordt lachen...' in 2014). In 2015, he launched a web series through 3LAB called 'Vriende', about a guy named Patrick who tries to make a sitcom for his terminally ill mother. Kakhiel also produced the music video for the song 'Stem' (2015) by Marco Borsato and Gers Pardoel. Until 2020, Kakhiel also provided a weekly cartoon to Bron, the online news medium of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences.
The absurdity of Kakhiel's humor can be traced back to Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen, and cartoonists like Kamagurka, Gummbah and especially Jeroom. Together with Ype Driessen, he is one of the few authors of photo comics in The Netherlands. In 2017, the Comics Museum Groningen held an exhibition of his work.
The elderly couple Evert and Evelien are regular characters in Kakhiel's photo comics. Evert is actually András Arató, a Hungarian former electrical engineer who often appears in stock photographs circulating on the Internet. Other online users have also featured him in a series of Internet memes, under the name 'Hide the Pain Harold'. It gained Mr. Arató a certain online fame. In an interview he stated that he's aware of this phenomenon, but doesn't mind, since he too also finds these memes amusing. The translation of this particular episode goes as follows: Evert: "What do you call somebody with a million bags of flour? A millionaire." (An untranslatable pun on "meel" (= "flour") and "miljonair" ("millionaire")).