Dad Dancing: hitting middle-aged men with the rhythm stick

It hits all men, apparently. During their youth, music treats their bodies as a companion, a welcoming host, a medium through which to express itself to the glitterballed world. That they can’t dance doesn’t matter. They are young. That is what counts.

Then it happens. One night, one song. The DJ strikes up Get Lucky. Sex on Fire pops up on the radio. They hit the dancefloor, the kitchen floor, wherever. They feel like a graceful synergy of tempo and physical fluidity. Until someone – usually a child, or partner – groans. They are informed that they are an embarrassment, that they look like a man being attacked by a swarm of wasps. While having 23 simultaneous strokes. During an exorcism.

They are Dad Dancers.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happens. You certainly don’t have to be a dad. It’s not that the moment a baby comes screaming into your life you lose all sense of rhythm, as if musically triggered motor skills are a great sacrifice necessary to bring new life into the universe. Middle-aged men without children are no greater dancers. They are just as likely to hit the dancefloor as an amalgam of one of the Thunderbirds and John Hurt with an alien bursting from his chest.

And that’s it. The rhythm years are over. You are a Dad Dancer. You are a flailing, lock-limbed eejit. An embarrassment to your partner, a scourge to your kids’ sensibilities. Cool has fled your body.

You now have two choices. Either you go for it and become the kind of guy comfortable to revel in this shift into the wrong gear, to hell with what the world thinks. Or you become horribly self-aware, suddenly conscious of your every missed step and ill-timed shoulder waggle. Either way, you are still a Dad Dancer. You never had a choice in that.

This week, Prince William and the Edge – both dads, only one of them middle-aged – were brought up on stages to join in celebrity singalongs for charity. Both left as globally acknowledged Dad Dancers, their efforts plastered on YouTube for the world to laugh at.

Prince William was performing Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer. Everyone knows that only Jon Bon Jovi can do that song in an unironic way. Unfortunately, William was standing beside Jon Bon Jovi at the time.

The Edge, meanwhile, appeared on stage with Nile Rodgers and Bono. During a blast of Good Times, he was all stiff shoulders and toddler claps. It took a moment to realise what was going on there: he was on stage without his guitar. He was missing his partner, lacking his counterweight. He was surrounded by people on the stage, but he was alone, dancing to the staccato beat of the world's sniggers.

Dad Dancers, declared the many, many headlines.

Becoming rhythmically written off is one of the great disappointments of middle age, and which you presume happens only to other men – most obviously, your dad.

It is not helped knowing that science has a pretty miserable answer for why it happens. In 2009, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire studied the dancing styles of 13,715 people, and came to the conclusion that Dad Dancing was the unconscious act of middle-aged men repelling younger women.

"The message their dancing sends out is 'Stay away, I'm not fertile'," said Dr Peter Lovatt. "It would seem completely unsurprising to me that since middle-aged men have
passed their natural reproductive age, and probably have a family already, evolution would act to ensure they are no longer attractive to 18-year-old girls."

“It’s like an apple that is going brown – you want a fresh green one instead,” he said, presumably just before adding that middle-aged men will never play in the FA cup final no matter how much they think they’ve still got it, and that the bald patch on the back of their head is noticeable no matter what their wives say.

This year, the Oxford English Dictionary even gave Dad Dancing a typically dry definition: "An awkward, unfashionable or unrestrained style of dancing to pop music, as characteristically performed by middle-aged or older men."

Which means we can officially add Dad Dancing to the cultural arsenal aimed at the poor dad, now treated by adverts and television and Peppa Pig as a lovable but unreliable bumbler, the least cool member of the human species, always there to give the rest of the family some eyerolling exercises. Whose name becomes “Stop it, Dad”.

Yet, the middle-aged man knows he still has it, that he never lost it, even if he never quite had it in the first place. He came of age to punk. He once skanked with the best of them. He was there in the great age of rave. He was in the pit at Nirvana in ’92. So what if he’s now wearing a sensible jumper? Inside, he’s dancing. And it doesn’t feel like Dad Dancing.

shegarty@irishtimes.com
@shanehegarty