Michael Scott With Speaker "Everybody Dance Now"

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About

Michael Scott With Speaker "Everybody Dance Now" refers to a series of memes using a clip from The Office where Michael Scott holds a speaker up to the ceiling and loudly plays the song "Everybody Dance Now" so the workers upstairs can hear it. The clip comes from season 5 episode 27, titled "Cafe Disco," and became popularized as a meme on TikTok in April 2023 in videos edits about playing loud music, often replacing the location Scott is in and the music he's playing.

Origin

On May 7th, 2009, season 5 episode 27 of The Office aired on TV, in which Michael Scott sets up a "cafe disco" in a unit under the office where he expects his employees to come dance and have coffee. At one point, Scott grabs a speaker, plays "Everybody Dance Now" and holds the speaker to the ceiling to garner the employees' attention (shown below). According to a 2021 article published by Mashable,^[8] the rights to use the song for the scene cost $40,000.

The scene was converted into a GIF, often captioned "EVERYBODY DANCE NOW," numerous times throughout the 2010s.^[1]^[2] On July 22nd, 2012, Tumblr^[3] user omgtooreal uploaded an image macro using a GIF of the scene with a caption about their favorite song coming on, garnering over 1,000 notes in 11 years (shown below). This is the earliest known meme to use the scene.

Spread

In April 2023, a green screen of the scene became popular on TikTok. On April 4th, 2023, TikToker^[4] @igreenscreenthings posted the green screened scene, garnering over 372,000 views in two months. They also posted it to YouTube^[5] garnering over 22,000 views in the same span of time. On April 5th, TikToker^[9] @jjosephines posted a meme using the green screen that gained over 2.9 million views in two months (shown below).

On April 7th, TikToker^[6] @henrieviii posted a meme using the clip that gained over 143,000 views in two months (shown below, left). On April 10th, TikToker^[7] @colormee.d posted a meme to the clip that gained over 4.5 million views in the same rough span of time (shown below, right).