TikTok: Brit makes fun of German culture – with great success

Liam Carpenter
Brite makes fun of German peculiarities on TikTok – with great success

On TikTok, Liam Carpenter shows from a Brit’s perspective how strange Germans often behave. Millions of people now want to see that.

It’s snowing outside and there’s already a thick layer of snow on the roof window. But Liam Carpenter opens the window anyway. “In Germany we don’t say: Wow, it’s really cold today, we’d better keep the windows closed,” he explains in English. “We say: shock ventilation.”

Anyone who feels caught doing this corresponds exactly to the German cliche that Carpenter makes fun of on his TikTok account. In another clip he shows the contrasts between British breakfast culture and the German breakfast with several types of rolls and hermetically sealed jam. The two videos are his most successful, with nine and eleven million views respectively, but they are just two of many clips in which the 27-year-old satirically deals with German culture.

Liam Carpenter makes fun of hiking and the train on TikTok

His content is becoming increasingly popular; two million people now follow him on the video app. Carpenter films himself in lederhosen and with two pints of beer while strength training for the Oktoberfest, mocking the tardiness of Deutsche Bahn, the fear of the tax office and the Germans’ obsession with hiking. With great success – he now even does it full-time.

Liam Carpenter is a British native from Kent. At 18 he came to play basketball Germany and was active for the Crailsheim Merlins in the Bundesliga. Nothing came of his great career on the court, but Carpenter took a close look at German peculiarities. Since 2021 he has also been showing this creatively on social media.

Married to a German

For Carpenter, punctuality and directness are the outstanding German characteristics. Sometimes he even appears in a double role on his account: as a Brit and as a German in the same video. A role that he now also plays in real life: he accepted German citizenship a few years ago and is also married to a German woman. The couple lives in Baden-Württemberg. So he seems to like it here quite well, despite all the strange customs and behavior of the Germans.

Sources: Liam Carpenter on TikTok / BuzzFeed