John Cena Dancing with Headphones

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About

John Cena Dancing with Headphones refers to an exploitable greenscreen template showing John Cena with headphones on, dancing in his chair while wearing a pink, salmon-colored suit. The original video was from a John Cena interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2017. In early 2023, the moment of Cena dancing became a CapCut template on TikTok where it earned various meme iterations in which Cena's goofy, joyous mood was paired with captions. The main TikTok sound was the song "Cupid" by Fifty Fifty.

Origin

On March 23rd, 2017, the official YouTube^[1] channel of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon uploaded a clip from its then-recent interview with John Cena in which they did "The Whisper Challenge." At the video's 0:31-minute mark, Cena has headphones on and starts dancing in his seat with his fists raised slightly (shown below). Over the course of six years, the video gained roughly 8 million views and 126,000 likes.

On April 23rd, 2022, the clip of Cena dancing was posted by the @fallontonight TikTok^[2] account, gaining roughly 328,700 likes in one year. Then, roughly a year later, on April 13th, 2023, CapCut^[3] user Ethan Genders created a template called "John Cena Dancing" that used a greenscreen of Cena on The Tonight Show. The first known usage of the template was uploaded by TikToker^[4] @ay3demi on April 14th, 2023, who wrote in text overlay, "When your friend shows you his new song and you gotta act like its good," and received roughly 69,000 plays and 10,000 likes in six days (shown below).

Spread

Going into April 2023, the template received increased virality, especially after TikTokers started using a TikTok^[5] sound called "cupid – bae" that was the K-pop song "Cupid" by Fifty Fifty.^[6] Currently, the first known TikToker to use the sound and template together was TikToker^[7] @biinxie on April 16th, 2023, who made a joke about "getting an ace or a nice clip" in Valorant, earning roughly 690,800 plays and 120,500 likes in four days (shown below).

More viral iterations soon followed, such as a video posted by TikToker^[8] @motionav on April 18th, 2023, that had text overlay about getting that "I'm outside" text from a friend, earning roughly 5.5 million plays and 1 million likes in two days (shown below).

On April 19th, 2023, iFunnyer^[9] @Cheesy_Breezy reposted one of the John Cena Dancing TikToks, earning roughly 29,700 smiles in one day. Compilations of the memes also surfaced on YouTube.^[10] Over the course of one week, CapCut^[3] user Ethan Genders' template gained over 389,400 uses and 6,300 likes.