The bizarre dance craze originated completely by accident. In 2003, Harding had just quit his job as a video game designer and was backpacking around Southeast Asia with some friends. One day in Vietnam they were videotaping each other when one of his companions suggested he do his “geeky dance.” Harding continued to do the jig in various Southeast Asian countries that he visited on the trip. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him in centre frame, and added some background music–a world music song entitled Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. Harding first posted himself online in January 2005. The video was passed around by e-mail and by various bloggers and eventually became viral, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered. “It got picked up by somethingawful.com and sites like that,” Harding recalled. “Usually, what they showed was people getting hurt or doing something really stupid, so I was bracing myself for abuse, but everyone seemed to like it.”

Bemused by his antics and impressed by the following he was amassing, the makers of Stride Gum contacted Harding and asked him if he would be interested in making another video for them for the debut of their chewing gum, which was slated for June 2006. With Stride’s sponsorship money, Harding journeyed to 39 countries on seven continents, including Antarctica, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and Easter Island, stopping to film himself busting a move at each destination. From these wanderings, he created a second video called “Dancing 2006.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Harding admitted that the most difficult dance he did took place on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “I spent nine hours climbing up to the peak, I vomited eight times on the way up and I just had nothing left by the time I got up there.” The most complicated video was shot underwater in Micronesia in front of the propeller of a Japanese shipwreck that was sunk in World War II. The most terrifying two-step was on the Kjeragbolten rock in Norway. “It’s just a tiny rock wedged between two faces of a chasm 3,000 feet up and only a few feet across. Dancing on that rock, yeah, I came very close to killing myself.”

Although there is no discernable connection between chewing gum and bad dancing, Stride offered to sponsor Harding strutting his stuff around the world again in 2007 and 2008. Amazingly, in this era of shameless commercial tie-ins, he was not obliged to wear a Stride T-shirt or deliver a little pitch for the product. Harding released his third dancing video on June 20, 2008, the product of 14 months of travelling in 42 countries. In his early videos, Harding dances alone, but in his third video he is usually in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, painted tribesman in New Guinea, Bollywood dancers in India, waitresses clad in French maid costumes in Tokyo, all copying, or trying to, his spastic gyrations. Harding’s girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, helped to produce the video. Nixon organized the 40 or so dancing events, culled from a list of more than 20,000 invitations from fans around the world to come boogie with them in their hometowns. The esoteric background music, a piece called ”Praan,” was composed by Gary Schyman specifically for the video. The vocals were supplied by a 17-year-old Bengali singer named Palbasha Siddique, with lyrics adapted from the poem “Stream of Life,” by Rabindranath Tagore.

Today, Harding estimates that his online dance videos, which appear on YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and on his own website: www.wherethehellismatt.com, have been viewed more than 20 million times. The miracle of Internet fame has transformed his life. Harding was recently recruited by Visa to star in its “Travel Happy” advertising campaign, and has hired a publicist to help him field interview requests. He is also in demand as a public speaker, an amazing development considering he never utters a word in any of his videos. As for the message he hopes to convey through his globe-stomping antics, Harding says: “A wildly exaggerated view of the natural joyfulness and goodwill of our species. I make humanist propaganda. I try to trick people into thinking the world is wonderful so they will act accordingly.”

Photo Credits:

#1: smh.com.au

#2: gamespot.com

#3: brandrepublic.asia

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”

”Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.”

“If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”

“The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, you know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”

“I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me–they’re cramming for their final exam.”

Well, I wonder how George fared. As you may have heard, Carlin died on June 22 in Los Angeles of heart failure at age 71. I expect he is keeping everyone in stitches in the Great Beyond.

Carlin began his career in comedy as a jacket-and-tie kind of guy, with a partner, Jack Burns, but in the 1960s, he went solo with his act, donning a beard and a ponytail, and went on to redefine standup comedy, shattering taboos and becoming a counterculture icon. He constantly pushed the envelope with his humour, particularly with his famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV.” When Carlin uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. And when they were played on a New York City radio station, they resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1978 upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language. “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he said earlier this year.

During his long and productive career, Carlin produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies. He also hosted numerous episodes of Saturday Night Live, including the show’s first, on October 11, 1975, about which he noted on his website that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long.”

The targets of Carlin’s acerbic and cerebral commentary were many: organized religion, political correctness, unscrupulous advertising, baby boomers, politicians, hypocrisy, and the English language, to mention just a few. Two of his funnier diatribes were about the airlines and their silly announcements and the absurdities of airport security. In case you haven’t caught these two routines, I am including the links to the pages on YouTube where you can view them. Take note: They include a few words and phrases that some people may find objectionable.

Click to watch the video on airline announcements

Click to watch George Carlin on airport security

Before abandoning the subject of African wildlife safaris, I want to make mention of a YouTube video entitled “Battle at Kruger,” which some have described as the best nature video ever shot. This rivetting, eight-minute piece of footage depicts a clash between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a pride of lions and a crocodile at a watering hole in Kruger National Park in South Africa. The video has drama, suspense and a twist ending with a lesson for everyone.

First posted on YouTube in May 2007, it quickly became one of the hottest uploads in web history that didn’t feature a naked celebrity or a politician making a career-ending gaffe. As of January 1, 2008, the video had attracted more than 22 million views and 20, 000 comments and had been covered in Time magazine. This fall, the National Geographic Channel plans to air an hour-long special documenting the story.

The clip was filmed during a guided safari in September 2004 by American tourist David Budzinski, who enjoyed spectacular timing and luck, especially considering that he barely knew how to turn his camera on. As the Texan told ABC News, “It’s a camera that I had used maybe once a year. Even today, I have to practise with it to remember which buttons do what. I truly was blessed at the time to hold it steady and catch what I did, because very easily, I could have missed so much.”

Ironically, Budzinski did not post his video on YouTube. In fact, he didn’t even know what YouTube was. Jason Schlosberg, a fellow vacationer on the safari that fateful day in 2004, asked Budzinski for a copy of the video, because he’d “never seen something so amazing.”For more than two years, the Battle at Kruger remained something Budzinski and Schlosberg occasionally shared with family and friends when they stopped by for a visit. Then, in May 2007, Schlosberg finally decided to share the clip with a friend of his from South Africa who’d moved to Ohio and had been pestering Schlosberg to see the video. To avoid long lines at the post office, Schlosberg put the clip on the Internet and a global phenomenon was born. Let me know what you think.