What do you get when you dress in absurd animal costumes and dance in the moonlight shrieking and gyrating for nearly 4 minutes? The fox trot of the twenty-first century. What was supposed to be a quack, has been unexpectedly catapulted to viral fame, and even managed to bark its way up Billboard’s Hot 100.
The strange video “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis is part intoxicated petting zoo, part furry fandom. The outlandish farm feature has merited more than 120 million views on YouTube.
The song literally mimics animal sounds paired with catchy dance moves, like the chicken dance without your drunk uncle. With bird tweets laid over deep beats and EDM synths, the cow moos and the cat meows actually provoke toe-taps. The tune is accompanied by lyrics that put Rebecca Black (and the new atrocity by Alison Gold) in the dog house.
Speaking of, here is a sample of the lyrics:
“Dog goes woof, cat goes meow, bird goes tweet, and mouse goes squeek, cow goes moo, frog goes croak, and the elephant goes toot, ducks say quack, and fish go blub, and the seal goes ow ow ow, but there’s one sound, that no one knows…”
This mystery is answered by a repetition of vocal seizures, consisting of high shrieks, and other bizarre variations, including: chacha’s, wa-pa-pa’s, ding-a-ding-ding’s, hatee-hatee-ho’s, and so on.
I can’t get it out of my head, but I also refuse to sing it out loud.
Even as the duo are just now appearing on American talk shows, the likes of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Ellen, brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåker have actually been famous in Norway for over a decade.
As they have explained, the original idea was to make something so terrible and unsuccessful, that they would be forced to apologize for it on their talk show.
“We thought it would be more fun from a comedian perspective to come home to the talk show and say, ‘Listen we had the chance, we could’ve made it big, but the only idea we got for the song was this old idea about what the fox says so we’re sorry. We screwed up.’ That was the plan…”
So when you meet your horse, will you speak in Morse? No deeper meaning here.
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And if that isn’t enough, watch this video of a pizza delivery guy being pranked by guys in underwear dancing to the song.
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