2013 / Video / Comedy music video
What Does the Fox Say?
A Norwegian comedy duo asked a perfectly normal animal question and answered it with noises nobody needed.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
The song starts as a tidy animal-noise lesson, then stops at the fox and spirals into increasingly theatrical guesses. Forest creatures, rave lighting, costumes, and a chorus of invented noises turned a children’s-question premise into maximalist pop nonsense.
Where it came from
Ylvis—the Norwegian comedy duo of brothers Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker—released “The Fox” as a music-video sketch tied to their television comedy work. The official TV Norge upload arrived in September 2013.
Why it mattered
What Does the Fox Say? captured a new kind of web hit: a polished, intentionally ridiculous comedy video that still felt native to internet sharing. It was proof that viral culture could make a local comedy act globally legible without sanding off the weirdness.
How it spread
The official video broke out internationally through YouTube shares, parody videos, and classroom sing-alongs. It ended 2013 as YouTube’s top trending video, crossing language and geography with a joke that required almost no translation.
Keep going
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