15 interesting facts about “What Does the Fox Say?”
1) The original song was an advertisement for a Norwegian talk show
The Ylvisåker brothers are a comedy duo from Norway, and the original idea for creating the track and the video was simply to promote the brothers’ third season of their talk show, I Kveld Med Ylvis (Tonight With Ylvis). Instead, the brothers got a little more than they expected.
“We’re not chasing the next hit,” Bård told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. “We’re just making stuff that we think is funny. Some [videos] will get like 100,000 views and some obviously got 100 million, but it’s the same recipe. It’s supposed to be three minutes for a Norwegian talk show and this one traveled.”
2) Both brothers have a musical background
The two spent part of their boyhoods in Mozambique and Angola, and according to Bård, they were so socially awkward when they returned to their native Norway that “we almost became those douches who pull out the guitar by the campfire,” he said, via the Star. Vegard also learned how to play the double bass, while Bård studied the violin. “Our parents were always really fond of music and they encouraged us to do whatever we wanted to do. We went to choir and stuff when we were kids,” Bård told Entertainment Weekly. According to Vegard, the songs were never meant to be taken seriously, even in their younger years. “We sang continuously, we made small music things in our room,” Vegard said. “But it was always with a comic context. We always hide behind that. We’re too much of cowards to actually mean something.”
