By now, your social media news feed must has already shown your a pile of seemingly sinister but funny videos of a group of boys dancing with a casket after a fail clip with a moving soundtrack in the background.
If this stands true for you, I’m sure you must be wondering how these boys came to rule the internet in this quarantine time. Well, Campus Bee as usual, is here to bring to you all you need to know about the origin of this video meme.
For starters, pallbearers are the people who carry the casket to the grave. Many pallbearers dress up formally and observe a high degree of respect while conducting their work. This however is defied by a group of Ghanaian pallbearers known as Benjamin’s Company who introduced a different version of giving the last respect to the loved ones. This group will dance all the funny strokes and do all the funny activities to the casket, including hoisting it in air as they walk with it to the grave.
This queer approach therefore caught attention and slowly started penetrating the internet until when it made its way to the memers.
The first video of these dancing pall bearers made its way to YouTube on January 22nd 2015 uploaded by American blogger Travelin Sisters. This received over 2.9 million views in three years, something that had never happened to the channel.
On 27th July 2017, another video was uploaded to YouTube by BBC when they were interviewing the leader of the group Benjamin Aidoo. This however did not get a good viewership.
Facebook received the first video of the dancing pall bearers on 2nd May 2019 when Facebook user Bigscout Nana Prempeth uploaded the video showing these pallbearers falling with the casket. This video received over 4,600 shares. Well, are we even supposed to be talking about all this? Relax, here is how it started.
The first person to upload an actual meme video was tiktok user @lawyerggmu on 26th Feb 2020. He edited the video depicting a fail clip with the astronomia soundtrack and ended it with the dancing pallbearers.
The astronomia song was a collaboration of Russian Tony Igy and the Dutch electronic music duo Vicentone which was sung in 2010 and later remixed in 2014.
After @lawyerggmu made this meme debut on Tiktok, thousands of people joined the fun and made it trend everywhere. India is the country that wildly joined these chain before it traversed across the globe.
Later the meme penetrated to other social media sites and has since then been trending throughout these quarantine period. The video meme has since turned into a photo meme with one meme photoshopped into one billboard advising people to “either stay home or dance with us.” Another meme showed these boys photoshopped into a selfie behind UK premier Boris Johnson. This was after he went into intensive care with coronavirus.
These daring dancing pallbearers have at least made us find where to run when we are tired of ‘waking up to sleep again’ due to the lockdown. I mean, how would we manage to smile with all the news filled with deaths trends everywhere.
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