Making My Boyfriend Do an Interpretive Dance

Submission 157

About

Making My Boyfriend Do an Interpretive Dance, also known as the Interpretive Dance Trend, refers to a TikTok trend of making men, usually boyfriends, husbands and brothers, do an interpretive dance in order to earn something, most often in order to spend the night or receive some kind of reward. The original video was about making a roommate's boyfriend perform an interpretive dance in order to spend the night. The Interpretive Dance TikTok trend started in October 2024, and the song used in the trend is called "Laterals" by Fat Code Studios, which is a bongo and drum song.

Origin

On October 3rd, 2024, TikToker^[1] @hummuslover33 posted a video that had text overlay reading, "Making my roommate's boyfriend perform an interpretative dance in order to spend the night." The video showed a man dancing to the drum song "Laterals" by Fat Code Studios^[2] for an audience of two women. Over eight days, the video received roughly 25 million plays and 4.6 million likes (shown below).

Spread

In the following days, others joined the trend using the same TikTok sound.^[3] For instance, on October 4th, 2024, TikToker^[4] @mrs_leyla_styles recorded her own boyfriend doing an interpretive dance in order to spend the night, receiving over 1.4 million plays and 246,800 likes in one week (shown below).

Iterations of the meme became increasingly elaborate as it spread, like one video posted by TikToker^[5] @emilyjbrooks9 on October 7th in which she made her boyfriend do an interpretive dance to spend the night, adding in parentheses, "(we are long distance he has no choice)," receiving over 3.6 million plays and 633,000 likes in four days (shown below).

Viral posts about the Interpretive Dance trend surfaced on other social media platforms as well. For instance, on October 4th, Twitter / X^[6] user @jabbywockers tweeted the original TikTok^[1] video, captioning it, "beta trolls do this with dave every time karkat wants to include him," referencing characters from Homestuck. Over one week, the tweet received over 2,600 likes (shown below).

On October 8th, 2024, X^[7] user @endoplasmian posted Splatoon fan art that showed, "making my roommate’s girlfriend perform an interpretive dance in order to stay the night," receiving over 900 likes in three days (shown below).