It was all supposed to be a joke. An “anti-hit.” Maybe even a terrible song, actually. And there was little chance it’d get heard outside Norway.
Instead, when Ylvis, the Norwegian comedy duo consisting of brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåker, premiered the jokey pop-electronica parody “The Fox” (better known as “What Does the Fox Say?”) as a teaser for their talk show kveld med YLVIS (Tonight with Ylvis), it became an international sensation.
The music video amassed 31 million views in its first two weeks on YouTube, on its way to a staggering 1.1 BILLION views total. It sent the Ylvisåker bros on a worldwide press tour that landed them on Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres and The Today Show. It launched a children’s book of the same name that debuted at No. 1 atop the New York Times bestseller list.
And it never even came close to accurately representing what a fox actually sounds like.
Ten years after Ylvis took the world by storm, we caught up with them for three questions.
1. What was the origin of “What Does the Fox Say?” (and more specifically, what were you guys under the influence of when you came up with it)?
Bård: Well, funnily enough, even though the Norwegian word for a joint is actually “fox,” there was no excessive use of any substances at the time when we came up with it.
Vegard: Maybe Pepsi Max.
Bård: Extra caffeine, probably some sort of work fatigue, or lack of sleep. No, but we had a talk show at the time, and we sort of wrote this song as one of three songs that we had every season. We were just sitting there throwing ideas and it was a genuine question.
Vegard: I remember the original idea for the song was that it was supposed to be about all kinds of different animal noises. I came in late that day, so Bård and our editor, Christian Løchstøer, who co-wrote the song, they said, ‘How about we just make it about the fox?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, it’s not going to work.’ So I’m very happy I was convinced to do it.
Bård: And we had struck a deal with some producers in New York and they were really hotshot and still are to this day, Stargate. They work with big names [Pink, Sia, Tiësto, David Guetta] and we traded favors. We were supposed to get a day in studio… But we were scared that if we tried to do something cool with them to make a pop song or something, that would be disastrous for us as comedians. So what we wanted to do was to sort of exploit their talent and use it in a bad way. Like, use their production value for a s***ty idea. But at the same time as a comedy product. We didn’t want it to tank, but as a pop song, we wanted it to be s***ty, but then be funny as a joke. So we spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to sort of hone in the idea and figure out how to best sort of execute it, even though it was stupid.
2. What was that like to watch the song accidentally blow up like it did?
Vegard: It was insane.
Bård: It’s an amazing privilege to be able to experience a thing like that as a joke, because I imagine if we were sort of pop artists trying to break through, it would be stressful at the same time. You’re trying so hard to make it and you get your chance and you have to max it out. But we were doing everything as a joke, so the moment they started streaming or playing it internationally, it was just like we were just laughing our asses off. And when you get invited to talk shows all over the world, it just makes the joke better.
Vegard: It also brought with it some kind of heartwarming aspects to it as well… There was some kind of natural disaster in Indonesia [the 2013 flood in Jakarta], and people told us that our song had been sort of a morale [booster]. It pushed morale a little bit during those hard times, and that was kind of nice to experience. You make some silly song about a stupid animal back in Norway and that millions of people find it like a reconciliation in hard times.
3. What did you think when people actually started to fact check it, as if those were actual fox noises you were making?
Vegard: It’s always been a consequence of trying to ridicule something or make fun of stuff because we actually experienced that two years prior with a song we made called “Stonehenge,” where the main line is “What’s the meaning of Stonehenge?” And it’s just a joke, obviously, but I still get emails every week with new discoveries, new theories, and I really want to say that I wasn’t really wondering what the meaning of Stonehenge was. It was a jokey song, but people keep sending those emails.
Bård: And we were told that in English, you guys say that the fox says “Yip,” which is really a s***ty word for it. It does not sound like yip. We know that. So every time something surfaces about a fox, we get our inboxes full of videos, like the same video a hundred times. “Oh my God, this is what it says!” But still to this day, I think it’s a legitimate question and it is a weird sound.
