Mufasa's Friday Dance

Origin

‘Mufasa’s Friday Dance’, also called ‘It’s Friday Then’, is a video of a man dancing purely because Friday has arrived. The original was posted on October 11th, 2019 by the Instagram creator Mufasa, under the handle cousinskeether.

The setup is simple. His friend Hypeman films him beside a moving car and cheers him on; the two trade the line ‘It’s Friday then, it’s Saturday, Sunday, what?’ before Mufasa breaks into a dance. The music is a remix of ‘Push The Feeling On’ by the Nightcrawlers. The post passed 270,000 likes and 1.5 million views on Instagram over the following year.

Spread

Beyond Instagram it travelled through Reddit and YouTube before exploding on TikTok. Because it can be reused every time a Friday comes round, it became a meme summoned weekly rather than one that peaks and dies, and Twitch gained an emote drawn from the dance that gets used directly in chat.

The largest postscript is musical. Building on the track the meme used, the producer Riton and the Nightcrawlers released ‘Friday (Dopamine Re-Edit)’ officially in 2021, and it charted in several countries. One Instagram video effectively returned the original song to the charts a quarter of a century on.

Usage

• Celebrating the mere fact that it is Friday
• Reacting to the start of any break: a weekend, the end of a shift, a holiday
• Lip-sync videos reciting the ‘It’s Friday then’ line

The words carry no particular meaning and the only requirement is the day of the week, which is why it survives its own trend cycle and comes back round once a week.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘It’s Friday Then / Mufasa’s Friday Dance’ — the October 11th, 2019 Instagram original by cousinskeether; Hypeman’s filming and the exchanged line; the Nightcrawlers ‘Push The Feeling On’ remix; 270,000 likes and 1.5 million views
• Wikipedia, ‘Friday (Riton and Nightcrawlers song)’ — the 2021 official release derived from the meme and its chart performance
• Know Your Meme video entry — the clips as they circulate