Comedian Tabish Hashmi once joked that the wedding of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s son should be a humbling experience for all those flaunting their lifestyle on Instagram. That ‘us’ nobodies should sit on the side and simply observe what actual affluence looks like.

He wasn’t wrong, given the kind of muscle the Ambanis were able to pull, from Hollywood to Bollywood. The spectacle was less a wedding and more a reminder of how far wealth can stretch the idea of celebration. Just the images of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, David Beckham and the Kardashians casually drifting through the venue like guests at some lavish exotic retreat was nauseating to most — and perhaps deeply inspiring to the local elite circles, who must have spent the endless wedding feeling painfully ordinary by comparison.

However, the masses, Indian masses in particular, weren’t moved by that. The masses continued to stage their own versions of spectacle — Bollywood lookalikes lip-syncing to ’90s hits, carefully choreographed nostalgia repackaged as glamour. If anything, it seemed to confirm an older suspicion: that mass culture would always trail behind, reproducing the gestures of the elite in ‘cheaper’, cruder forms — the kitsch in its various manifestations.

Then a gorilla walked in.

Not because it belonged there, but because it didn’t. The gorilla did not resemble wealth, nor did it attempt to imitate it. It arrived as interruption: loud, excessive and completely out of place within the carefully managed ambit of celebration.

From TikTok weddings to medical school farewells, the dancing gorilla has gone from viral gag to cultural fixture. But beneath the absurdity lies a revealing story about spectacle, virality and modern celebration…

From TikTok weddings to medical school farewells, the dancing gorilla has gone from viral gag to cultural fixture. But beneath the absurdity lies a revealing story about spectacle, virality and modern celebration…

What began on wedding dance floors has now entered private parties and elite university events in Pakistan; the rubber gorilla — the costume inflated by a built-in fan — has become a fixture not just of Instagram algorithms but of celebration itself.

That the gorilla now appears as comfortably at elite university events as at TikTok weddings suggests something larger than a viral trend. Older distinctions between prestige and parody, it seems, no longer hold.

Looking at any of these viral gorilla videos, you will find a number of unifying tropes. First of all, the gorilla’s performance itself is almost secondary to its documentation. Most guests encounter the gorilla not directly but through their phone screens, filming from a safe distance, as though absurdity only becomes complete once captured and reposted.

At one such recent farewell event at a medical college, the gorilla arrived to........

© Dawn (Magazines)