Apparently the latest dance craze combines the spastic idiocy of the Chicken Dance with the heartfelt celebration of morbidity which is the Tarantella. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the time is ripe for a dance that makes the Lambada look tasteful, the Pogo graceful. And it has achieved its highest expression here, in the half-scale crawlspace inhabited by this freakish, almost subhuman performer. UPdate: video removed or something. Replaced with your common or garden variety of Jamaican bird flu dance.

Sploid has an update:

A dance craze sweeping the Ivory Coast has onlookers baffled.

“It’s like a chicken with Parkinson’s disease trying to dance to hip-hop,” said one person who saw it.

Dancers stretch out their arms, bend them at the wrists, and then start trembling and twitching … to hip-hop. It’s called the bird flu dance, perhaps due to the fact that avian flu tends to set in when birds engage in strenuous activities such as dancing to African hip-hop.

The man who invented the dance, DJ Lewis, said that he was trying to lighten the mood after the H5N1 strain of bird flu turned up in his country.

“I created the dance to bring happiness to the hearts of Africans and to chase away fear — the fear of eating chicken,” he said.

“If we kill all our chickens and poultry, our cousins in the village will become poor. So I created the bird flu dance to put joy back into our hearts.”

Kottke.org has diligently traced “the Jamaican strain of the bird flu dance” (Watch a video set to unlistenable music! [nowhere near as much fun as this vid]), but thus far nobody has been able to find video of the Ivory Coast version.