The World’s Only Blog

The problem with “funny dancing,” or dancing badly on purpose, is that it gets old really quickly.

You’ve seen it before. You’re at a house party. Prince or some other booty music is pumping through the speakers. But no one’s really doing anything. They all just stand there, looking and talking, talking and looking, like a bunch of talking, looking assholes at a party.

And then it happens. An inspired artiste glides past the insouciant stand-abouts to the center of the room with a confidence that declares, “Heed me now, onlookers, for I am going to make you laugh like you’ve only laughed maybe once or thrice before.”

Next thing you know, he’s an octogenarian Katharine Hepburn mowing the lawn. He’s a latter-day Muhammad Ali directing air traffic. He’s Michael J. Fox rendering Arabic calligraphy on an invisible papyrus with his ink-daubed elbows.

At the peak of his routine, he’s pantomiming doing his taxes, and boy is that crazy motherfucker yielding a big refund—in laughs. Note that when I say “he,” I’m not being sexist. The funny-dancer is almost always male. Women who attempt this are sad and aberrational, like cats that wear sweaters and women who do standup. And women who wear cats that do standup. Standup rife with absurdist mysogyny. Absurdist mysogyny that— Okay I’ll stop.

Inevitably our funny-dancer is joined by a wannabe, an upstart who wants to steal the spotlight. But he doesn’t have “It,” the X-Factor, that uncategorizable blend of stage presence and moves that separates the geniuses from the try-hards.

What exactly distinguishes funny-bad from bad-bad? Tsk, you might as well ask me how many stars there are on the American flag, or where sky-blue rests on the color wheel. Silly reader, nobody knows. What we do know is that, at the pinnacle, the best of funny-dancers generate a grandiose hilarity that reacquaints the observer with his or her own cosmic smallness. I once saw a series of drunken pirouettes that made me fall to my knees and mutter, “They should have sent a poet.”

But then, inescapably, comedic entropy always sets in.

Like a spent candle, like a wilting romance, like the diffusion of the universe’s matter and energy into nothingness, like a string of over-reaching, masturbatory and cloyingly self-referential similes that not only dilute an already inessential sentence but call into question the self-esteem of those shit-slurping masochists who read to its anticlimactic finish, the routine fades.

The dancer’s schtick becomes hammy, self-conscious, unfunny. The worse part is that everybody’s rooting for the guy at first. But the smiles, once shaped by amusement, become forced. When the momentum slows down you can feel it sink the collective goodwill in the same way a corpse drags down a buoyant swimming pool tarp.

I’ll never forget that dark autumn day. Papa?

So, yeah, it’s a letdown. But it shouldn’t be a surprising one. The record for longest successful funny-dance is held by my Uncle Rick, who in 1986 went sixteen-and-a-half hours slapping his own ass cheeks, doing jitter-squats, and sweating away twenty-five percent of his body mass. Even then it’s only because he’d been bitten by a tarantula. And he died afterward.