Taylor Hicks gives new meaning to square dancing

Taylor Hicks’ voice may thrill, but the new “American Idol’s” dance moves would make even “Seinfeld’s” Elaine cringe.

“He wriggles all around like a palsied cocker spaniel with his eyes closed and screaming ‘Woo!’ for no reason,” says Jacob Clifton in his weekly TelevisionWithoutPity.com recaps. “Seriously. What is the deal?”

Actually, Hicks is just the latest in a long line of pop culture heroes whose seriously bad dancing is embraced by the masses.

Discussion boards still froth 10 years after Julia Louis Dreyfus’ character first danced on “Seinfeld.” Elaine’s combination of bizarre kicks, uncoordinated flailing and thrusting thumbs was so terrifically awful that her buddy George reacted with a cry of “Sweet fancy Moses!”

The computer-generated dancing baby from “Ally McBeal” and Master P’s pathetic efforts on “Dancing With the Stars” entranced viewers. And Napoleon Dynamite’s choreography was so, er, compelling, there are Learn to Dance Like Napoleon kits.

“We clearly like people who dance really, really well – Michael Jackson, John Travolta in ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ We like watching someone who just looks so cool,” says pop culture expert Robert Thompson of Syracuse University.

“But auditions on ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ Al Gore getting down to Fleetwood Mac at the Clinton inaugural, is kind of fun because it’s so cringe-worthy.”

Elaine was just dorky, but Napoleon was so supremely square that it was cool, Thompson says.

As for Hicks, he says: “Taylor lumbers but he embraces it with such a vision that he redefines what he’s doing. … My guess is we’re going to have a lot of people dancing like Taylor at prom.”

Sweet fancy Moses!