About

Dancing Cockroach, also known as Dancing Roach, refers to a viral video of a 3D-animated cockroach dancing to autotuned scat singing. Based on a GIF animation created in 2015, in August 2019, the video gained popularity as a shitpost on Twitter and Instagram.

Origin

On July 12th, 2015, CGI artist John Karel uploaded a GIF animation of a 3D cockroach jumping in a circle to his Tumblr account.^[1] The post gained over 2,400 notes within four years (shown below).

On February 2nd, 2019, Twitter user @ZavierFourside posted a meme based on a comical image of Spider-Man accompanied by an autotuned voice recording of Twitter user @TrashSnapshot singing (shown below).^[8] The tweet gained over 400 retweets and 980 likes in seven months.

I have never put together anything more stupid than this pic.twitter.com/kS1HvFVSNs

— Hero of Luck (@ZavierFourside) February 3, 2019

Starting in July 2019, a sped-up version of the Cockroach GIF received spread on Discord servers as a popular spam message, with a Hoes Mad version also gaining popularity.^[7]

On August 6th, 2019, Instagram user kirbs.v1 posted a sped-up video of the animation accompanied by the voice recording,^[9] with Instagram user homonigga97 reposting it on the same day.^[2] The posts gained over 120 and 130 views in three months.On August 6th, iFunny user blackbear shared the latter post,^[3] gaining over 900 smiles in three weeks. On the same day, Twitter user @pepsiblack posted the video.^[4] The tweet received over 200 retweets and 390 likes in three weeks.

pic.twitter.com/eHm3wqxeo3

— fran🦕 (@pepsibIack) August 6, 2019

Spread

On August 13th, 2019, Twitter user @annadiamonds wrote "the cockroaches in the denny’s bathroom trying to cheer me up with a little dance as i have a mental breakdown on the toilet," attaching the @pepsiblack's video (shown below).^[5] The tweet gained over 26,600 retweets and 99,800 likes in two weeks, with the video accumulating over 1.3 million views in the same period.

the cockroaches in the denny’s bathroom trying to cheer me up with a little dance as i have a mental breakdown on the toilet pic.twitter.com/ALckyrLuJo

— anna (@annadiamonds) August 14, 2019

In the following weeks, the video gained notable popularity as a shitpost on Instagram and was used in various edits. For example, August 25th, 2019, post by Instagram user amoistnapkin gained over 34,800 views in one day.^[6]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References