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Shaquille O’Neal’s ‘Gorilla Dab’ Dance Is A Runaway Hit: Social Media Reactions

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 21:24 PST, Apr 26, 2016

On last night’s edition of Inside the NBA, Shaquille O’Neal unveiled the Gorilla Dab, a new dance he has been working on, and it is already beginning to take off across social media.

O’Neal’s Gorilla Dab involves the dancer pounding their chest, swiveling their head, stepping up and down, and shaking their arms, giving off the appearance of an excited gorilla.

Shaquille even composed a song to Gorilla Dab to and showed a video of himself at his house doing his dance in time to his song, although the version O’Neal did on the show’s set lacked music and was a bit more sedate.

It was no surprise that, as SB Nation notes, O’Neal was great at the dance.

The main reason being that Shaquille O’Neal is a legendary ex-NBA star who used to dance on the court during his career. Excelling at basketball takes a lot of limberness, agility, and coordination, all of which are helpful in effectively pulling off high-energy dance steps. Even besides O’Neal, many basketball players and teams have been known to devise their own dances in the past, and Shaquille is one of the game’s all-time greats, so why not?

The other reason O’Neal looked right at home doing the dance is because he himself is a 7’1? and incredibly muscular man. Shaquille’s intimidating appearance lends itself well to the Gorilla Dab, which seems to be designed to bring out the dancer’s “primal” side.

Unfortunately, O’Neal’s co-hosts were not quite as adept as he was when it came to Gorilla Dabbing. Although none of them cared to embarrass themselves by attempting it right after Shaquille, Charles Barkley decided to give it a go when he got up at the end of the show. The results, Twitter users agree, were not pretty.

The ribbing Barkley received for his rendition of O’Neal’s Gorilla Dab was all in good fun, though; most people thought it was hilarious.

Despite Barkley’s alleged butchering of the dance, however, Shaquille is trying his best to make the dance into a viral craze on the level of “The Soulja Boy.” O’Neal even offered $1,000 to whoever posts the “hottest routine.”

So far, most of the responses to O’Neal’s thousand dollar offer are just jokes, with no one even attempting to top Shaquille’s performance.

Some of the comments, however, are negative, saying that O’Neal’s Gorilla Dab is ugly and racist, and that the commenters are disappointed in Shaquille.

Poor spelling aside, what do you think about these comments? Is Shaquille O’Neal’s soon-to-be-viral dance indeed wack? Or will you be pulling it out at the next party you attend?

[Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP Images]

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