Can Superman Dance?

In a word... no.

"Wha -- what?," the Superman fans are sputtering. "But ... he's Superman! He has superventriloquism and super kidney function and he can see you coming for miles with those super-peepers of his! He must be able to not only dance, but super-dance."

Dream on, fanboy. Superman's a shufflefoot.

You know, those people --guys, mostly, particularly big luggish cornfed Midwestern farmboys -- whose attempts at dancing amount to shuffling their feet across the floor with only occasional accident correspondence with the music, desperate to maintain full sole-to-floor contact with both shoes at all times as if failure to do so would cause them to fall to the dancefloor in a hopeless tangle and flop helplessly like a walleye in a rocky motorboat, and who smash their partner as close as possible so that no one can see their feet.

Poor Lois has to dance with Clark a lot. You know, so some gangster can come along and embarrass her by shoving a grapefruit in Clark's face.

Lois feigns disgust as Clark picks the rinds out of his nostrils, but secretly she's relieved just to get off the dance floor, thinking, "googly-moogly, it's like dancing with a shopping cart with a bad wheel."

At one point, it got so bad, Lois was driven to Defensive Dancing. "Ha!" she aspirated. "I'll wear a dress made entirely out of an exceedingly thorny, yet beautifully blooming rosebush! Delicate Clark won't be able to dance with me without painfully stabbing himself all over."

As always, the joke's on Lois. Her secretly indestructible date doesn't notice the thorns and merely holds her more closely so as to supersmell their fragance, pressing the thorns deep into Lois's lovely gams, which leave a trail of seeping blood as they shufflefoot across the dancefloor.

Desperate to escape his diamond-vise grip, she considers chewing off her arms but instead opts for repeated pleas to the writer through the Fourth Wall; "the song has ended. NO, I'M TELLING YOU, HAVE THE SONG END ... NOW, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!"

Further evidence? In the panel below, unabashedly stolen from my friends at the Comic Treadmill, we see Clark Kent as the (*snort*) Sultan of Song , spinning platters as a latenight DJ.



Hi-yah! What a goober. Anyway, everyone knows DJs can't dance. It's why they become DJs. Case closed, people.

Let's try a little mental exercise. Picture if you can, George Reeves dancing or Christopher Reeve dancing (yes, I mean BEFORE, wiseguy). Not, pretty, is it?

Tom Welling's not much better. I mean, sure he's pretty, but on Smallville he only ever dances an aimless shufflefoot with Curiously Asian Lana Lang and the few times he has to go to some real club you never see him dance. He's too busy being concerned. Or sincere. Or supportive. Or psycho. Or something else traumatic.

And can you picture Brandon Routh shaking his groove thang to the pounding beat at some stylish polysexual discoteque in a tight black tanktop or his shirt already off with his arms waving wildly above his head while he gyrates his hips into the nearest other dancer, gender unspecified?

Hm. Okay, that one is fairly easy to picture, I guess. In fact, it's hard not to picture. IN FACT, I think I still have the video file somewhere on my computer... .

But that's just Clark Kent, you say. What about SUPERMAN? Surely he can do something more than a meandering shufflefoot dance!


Shudder. If he can, you don't want him to.

I really, really, really, did not want to have to show you that, people. But some of you just don't trust me. And, so, because of those people, you had to endure Superman strutting the Krypton Crawl.

Let's-- just agree not to discuss this matter anymore. Suffice it to say, "no, Superman can't dance."