Mamadou Ndiaye

AGE 24 HOMETOWN Jersey City, New Jersey TOTAL FOLLOWERS* 14.5 million GENRE Animal Kingdom Explainer Comedy

An animal lover since childhood, Mamadou Ndiaye racks up millions of views on his TikTok videos with scroll-stopping titles like “Top 5 Disrespectful Animals,” “Animals That Are Down Bad,” and “Why Koalas Are the Absolute Worst.” (The marsupial, which he calls a “degenerate” in the video, makes a sound like “Satan’s doorbell,” and has “the IQ of a cereal box,” he says.) The clips have a low-fi vibe, with Ndiaye holding an absurdly small microphone as he deadpans factoids in front of a green screen. “I try to educate and make people laugh, the way I would’ve liked to learn as a kid,” he says.

A 2019 graduate of Rutgers University, Ndiaye was just starting a career in environmental engineering when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Now, he earns a living making videos of animal facts with funny commentary on social media. As he’s become more established in the animaltok community, users have begun tagging him in videos of creatures they want him to explain, like a water snake covered in moss that he says looks like “something out of the Grinch’s sex drawer.” He researches his subjects, even if he’s already familiar with the species from years of watching Animal Planet. “I always fact-check myself,” he says, “because you don’t wanna be wrong on the internet.”