The Jig

About

The Jig refers to a picture of a man enthusiastically dancing at a formal event. After first appearing online in 2005 and being used in demotivational posters and other jokes, it saw little spread until the beginning of 2019, when it became a popular reaction image.

Origin

On October 25th, 2005, LiveJournal ^[1] user wunder_bar edited an image of a dancing man in a blue shirt into a photograph of an older man dressed in a white shirt excitedly dancing at a party (shown below, left and right). The edited photograph was a submission for a photoshop contest.

Spread

On October 27th, 2005, the image was posted on Yaplakal forum.^[2]

In the following years, the image saw some use in memes as an exploitable and demotivational poster. For example, a demotivational edit appeared on Photobucket user Nafka2007's page^[3] (shown below, left). On December 18th, 2007, an exploitable photoshopped edit appeared in Yaplakal^[4] (shown below, right).

The image did not see significant use outside until 2019, when it regained popularity as a reaction image. On March 18th, 2019, a deleted Reddit user posted it as a reaction image with the Deaf People Reacting to Subtitles meme, in /r/dankmemes,^[5] gaining over 69,000 points. This soon led to the creation of other memes using the image. For example, on June 9th, Imgur user GringoireGirl posted an example that gained over 1,200 views (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Template

External References