Music

A Tribute To Casey Frey’s Horny, Beautiful “Ur Dumb” Dance, The Best Video On The Internet

The video keeps getting funnier -- but why?

by Joseph Earp  22 April 2020
Casey Frey Ur Dumb Dance

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It is hard to explain the precise appeal of any Casey Frey skit, let alone his masterpiece, a video posted to his Twitter on May 10 last year with the simple caption, ‘Get tf out my way type way’.

In it, Frey plays three characters — a shirtless man chopping wood, a disparaging voyeur, and an aroused dance-fiend. It’s a threeway of sorts, in which the wood-chopper is negged by the voyeur, before finding his tribe, and joining the smooth-as-butter dance-fiend in an impromptu celebration of the body.

It’s a rejection, followed by a recapitulation: a video about the overcoming of hate with love.

Of course, it’s also precisely not about any of those things. The video’s joys aren’t narrative. This is not some swelling epic. It’s a minute of dancing, wrapped lightly around a story so vague as to be almost like a fable.

So what’s the deal? I mean, just watch it, and try to explain to me the reason why you immediately want to watch it again:

Let’s not lie. At least some of the appeal is that Frey is extremely hot. A one-time Vine superstar, the comedian has classic good looks that nicely offset the weirdo, surrealist turns of his videos.

He weaponises his face, and he long ago mastered the ability to throw who you think he is into stark contrast with who he actually is. Like here, for instance, where his two ways of being clash most abruptly:

It’s not just how Frey looks that makes the video so attractive, however; at least part of the appeal is how he moves. The first joke of the video is that the wood-chopper’s dancing is, in the beginning, a little uncertain; a little daggy — when the voyeur says the whole thing looks “dumb”, he’s kind of right.

But moments later, the dance flowers. It’s genuinely impressive how Frey moves his body, becoming viscous, and beautiful, and modern. It’s not just the voyeur who is won over. It’s the audience watching too.

Which is the other thing. Frey’s clip is, at the end of the day, oddly sincere. The comedian can sometimes operate on multiple levels of irony, making jokes that are funny because they have the texture and rhythm of something that isn’t a joke. But that’s not the case here. Frey’s video is sweet — genuinely sweet — in a way that makes everything funnier. The victory of the wood-chopper is hard-won, but it’s real.

Is that the whole explanation? No. But we probably won’t find one. Philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that true transcendence is about attempting to rationalise something and failing to do so. There’s a gap between your picture of the world and this thing, which is too beautiful — too overwhelming — for you to really understand. And you have to eventually be comfortable with that gap.

In fact, Frey’s dance is so iconic and wonderful and strange, that it has become fodder for recreations on Tik Tok, many of which are as beautiful and horny as the original:

The longterm appeal of the video shouldn’t be so surprising. Those in the know have long recognised the Casey Frey “ur dumb” dance as the best meme on the internet. Long may it ride.