What Does the Fox Say?

Origin

“The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” was released on September 3, 2013 by Ylvis, the Norwegian comedy duo of brothers Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker.

It was not meant to be a hit. It was not really meant to be a song. It was made to promote the third season of their Norwegian talk show, I kveld med Ylvis, and the brothers have said since that they expected it to fail — the plan was to make something deliberately, embarrassingly bad and let the failure be the joke.

The premise is genuinely funny: the song works through the sounds animals make — dog goes woof, cat goes meow, cow goes moo — and then arrives at the fox and simply does not know, dissolving into a sequence of increasingly unhinged invented noises.

The production is where the joke breaks. It is a properly made, expensive-sounding EDM track with a real hook and a lavish video, applied to a question a small child could have asked.

What it means / how it’s used

The song functions online as shorthand for an earworm that should not work and does. It is invoked to describe anything catchy and stupid, and the noises themselves — the ring-ding-ding sequence — are used as pure nonsense.

It also served, for a period, as a byword for 2013 internet culture: the peak of the viral-novelty-video era, when a well-produced joke song could dominate global attention for a season.

How it spread

The trajectory was extraordinary. The video took 31 million views in its first two weeks, became the top trending video on YouTube in 2013, and has since passed 1.1 billion views.

It reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and charted across Europe, North America and Australia — a Norwegian comedy sketch outperforming most of the year’s actual pop releases.

The brothers were visibly bewildered by it. They gave interviews explaining that the whole thing had been a promotional stunt for a talk show almost nobody outside Norway had heard of, and that they had no intention of becoming musicians.

Notable examples & variations

• The original video, still one of YouTube’s most-viewed.
• School and choir performances, which proliferated in late 2013.
• Parodies and answer songs.
• Halloween costumes from the 2013 season.
• Nostalgic reposts marking it as a 2013 time-stamp.

Legacy / cultural impact

“The Fox” is the definitive example of a deliberate flop that succeeded — and one of the clearest illustrations that the internet’s appetite for novelty music is not connected to whether anyone intends the music seriously.

It also marks the end of a particular era. It arrived alongside Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake in the last stretch before short-form video reorganised how songs go viral, and it is among the final examples of a full-length, expensively produced comedy music video conquering the internet on its own terms.