Jon Hamm dancing meme takes over Instagram and TikTok
Nostalgic millennials are the reason your social media feeds are suddenly full of actor Jon Hamm dancing in a club.
A scene from the Apple TV show Friends and Neighbors has taken over Instagram and TikTok feeds as world-weary millennials look back on their more care-free years.
The clip in question shows Hamm in his role as wealthy financier Andrew “Coop” Cooper, lost in a moment on a nightclub dance floor.
While Hamm’s character is taking a break from an unusual mix of life complications, including a messy divorce and robbing his neighbours for a living, the scene seems to have resonated with users weighed down by far more mundane routines.
In one typical TikTok clip playing into the trend, a user is holding a baby, with the caption reading, “You have a wife, two kids, and a lovely home. What more could you want?”
It then transitions to Hamm’s dance scene, declaring, “This.”
The meme revolves around millennial nostalgia for the mid-2000s, when they could party just hours before work and still have energy, in contrast to the morning exhaustion that now comes with age and life’s responsibilities.
The viral clip is set to the 2010 track called “Turn the Lights Off” by Danish DJ Kato, featuring vocals from singer Jon Nørgaard.
Interestingly, in the show itself, Hamm’s character dances to a different song, “Sentient System” by Joseph William Morgan, which was released in 2023, closer to when Your Friends and Neighbors was actually filmed in 2024.
But it is “Turn the Lights Off” that seems to have struck a chord with exhausted millennials, making the scene go viral months after the series first debuted earlier this year.
Some users pushed back against the “tired” millennial trope, with one 42-year-old TikToker showing herself in bed at 8 p.m. on the weekend just to reveal that she was out clubbing last night “because old and boring is a choice.”
Others tied the meme to other millennial anxieties, like the fear of driving behind a truck carrying logs, a macabre scene from the 2003 horror film Final Destination 2 that lodged itself in the generation’s collective psyche.
It’s unclear how the meme first emerged, but its rise coincides with Apple announcing that Friends and Neighbors will return for Season 2 in April 2026.
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