#JustAddZebras

About

#JustAddZebras is a hashtag started by John Oliver that features people editing videos to include footage of a dancing man in a zebra costume.

Origin

On Sunday, March 19th, John Oliver closed Last Week Tonight With John Oliver with a story about how people in Bolivia were dressing as zebras and dancing to make traffic jams more bearable. This inspired the show to devise a segment where they inserted their own dancing zebra with other news clips in the hope of making them more lighthearted (shown below).

Spread

The same day, the show's YouTube channel uploaded a silent, 23 minute video of a man in a zebra costume dancing in front of a green screen so that video creators could insert the footage into various other video clips. They then encouraged users to share their creations with the hashtag #JustAddZebras

Over the next two days, dozens of videos using the dancing zebra appeared on YouTube and Twitter. ^[1] The influx of #JustAddZebras videos was covered by Uproxx,^[2] Huffington Post,^[3] Time,^[4] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References