Walking like an Egyptian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the cultural phenomenon. For the song of a similar name see Walk Like an Egyptian
Walking like an Egyptian is a comic means of walking with one's limbs in angular positions resembling the posture of figures from ancient Egyptian reliefs. In the Egyptian reliefs, some figures are depicted with their hands free of any load, holding their arms up and out. Walking like an Egyptian imitates these (static) poses whilst actually walking. The stereotypical imitation is with the left arm held up more than 90 degrees from its resting position, elbow bent, and hand limp, with the right hand the same, but aimed downwards and out.
The "Egyptian" walk has no basis in fact, being a 20th century parodic creation, and ancient Egyptian statues demonstrate people walking in an entirely ordinary manner. Most likely the earliest form of this walk was the Egyptian Sand Dance, a 1930s comedy routine by the music hall trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty inspired by the surge of popular interest in all things Egyptian in the United States and in Europe, especially following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
"Walking like an Egyptian" has been frequently reprised in popular culture. In the 1947 Looney Tunes cartoon short "A Hare Grows in Manhattan" Bugs Bunny jumps into a billboard advertising "Egyptian Cigarettes" and adopts the stereotyped poses of pseudo-hieroglyphics to hide from his pursuer. In both the 1960 novel and 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, young Jem Finch, having just studied ancient Egypt in school, demonstrates the walk to his sister Scout and proclaims that the modern world would not have existed had the ancient Egyptians not invented perpetual embalming and toilet paper. Steve Martin's 1978 comedy song "King Tut" was based on a dance similar to the Egyptian Sand Dance; part of a Saturday Night Live comedy routine which capitalised on the renewed interest in Egyptian art during a blockbuster traveling exhibition of Tutankhamun's funerary cache in 1976-1979. In 1986 the pop group The Bangles had a #1 U.S. hit with their song "Walk Like an Egyptian". The gag is used in the opening sequence of the Discovery Kids animated series Tutenstein, and in Burger King's on-line viral marketing campaign The Subservient Chicken. Fashion designer John Galliano appropriated the cliché for the premiere of his Spring-Summer 2004 Haute Couture collection, which involved models in corsets and Egyptian-inspired masks walking like Egyptians down the runway.
A modern style of dance, known as "tutting", involves the dancer adopting similar postures in a rapid-fire rhythm accompanying electronic dance music, similar to popping.
