This past weekend, the infectious sounds of “Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!” echoed through my home as my sons enthusiastically belted out lyrics from the viral video sensation by Norwegian comedic duo Ylvis, “What Does the Fox Say?” Luckily, having been introduced to this quirky tune by a student just the week before, I was able to join in on their fun, much to their surprise. “You know that song?” Zac asked, genuinely astonished, prompting my best rendition of the nonsensical fox noises.
Like millions across the globe, I was instantly captivated by the sheer absurdity and catchy rhythm of the video. It’s the kind of sing-along earworm that’s been missing from my life since childhood camp songs. As Devon Maloney aptly observed in Wired’s Underwire, the “What Does the Fox Say?” song lodges itself firmly in your brain, triggering a cascade of surprisingly profound, almost philosophical questions that have puzzled thinkers for ages:
Questions like, “Why is this song about animal sounds so incredibly addictive?” and “Should I be reconsidering my understanding of animal vocalizations? Do elephants really ‘toot’?” And, most importantly, “Wait a minute, seriously, what sound does a fox actually make?”
My son Luke, ever the pragmatist, offered a straightforward, almost scientific answer: “We know what a fox says, Mom. It screams, and it sounds a lot like a human scream.”
While this empirical observation might satisfy the scientifically inclined, it barely scratches the surface of the semiotic enigma at the heart of the song. “What Does the Fox Say?” isn’t really about accurately mimicking animal sounds. It’s about the human endeavor to represent these sounds through language, our clumsy attempts to create words that capture the essence of animal vocalizations. The song brilliantly encapsulates our enduring fascination with onomatopoeia, those words that attempt to echo the sounds they describe. Animal noises are prime examples of onomatopoeic words, often among the first linguistic building blocks for babies, who learn to “moo” and “quack” almost as readily as “mama” and “dada.” (The video’s fleeting scenes of an elderly man reading to a child seem particularly insightful in this context.) The comedic genius of the “What Does the Fox Say?” video lies partly in the spectacle of sophisticated adults at a cocktail party, champagne flutes in hand, wholeheartedly embracing this childlike impulse to imitate the animal kingdom.
Adding another layer of humor, the video’s adult performers bear little resemblance to the animals they portray. This isn’t the theatrical realism of Cats, where feline mannerisms and sounds delve into a more unsettlingly adult form of anthropomorphism. Instead, “What Does the Fox Say?” operates within a children’s picture-book aesthetic, where humans remain distinctly human. By the time the “elephant man” emerges onto the porch, trumpeting a “toot,” it’s clear that his “toot” is as much a caricature of an elephant sound as his costume is of an actual elephant—which is to say, not very much at all. The animal costumes and sounds in “What Does the Fox Say?” are not imitations of real animals, but rather of the simplified, cartoonish icons we use to symbolize animals.
In this playful manner, “What Does the Fox Say?” delivers a surprisingly insightful lesson about language itself. It shines a light on the inherent human longing for a “pure” language, where words possess an almost magical, direct connection to the objects or concepts they represent. Yet, simultaneously, it cleverly exposes the illusion of such linguistic purity. Linguists, like Ferdinand de Saussure, have long taught us that language is fundamentally arbitrary—words don’t have some inherent, preordained link to their referents. There’s nothing intrinsically “cat-like” about the word “cat.” Instead, “cat” signifies a cat simply because it is not “bat” or “hat.” Similarly, the sounds “neigh” and the word “horse” aren’t inherently closer to equus ferus than if they were represented in Morse code (in another moment of uncanny wisdom, the video playfully questions if a h0-0-0-0rse would recognize its name in mo-0-0rse code). Words acquire meaning through their position within a system of signs, a chain of signifiers, not through any inherent, mimetic connection to reality. The fact that onomatopoeic words differ across languages—a dog goes “ouah-ouah” in French but “bow-wow” in English—underscores that even these “sound-alike” terms are shaped by linguistic conventions rather than purely natural sounds.
The term onomatopoeia itself originates from Greek words meaning name + making. It reflects the fundamental human impulse to name things—to capture and communicate the essence of the world around us. However, the etymology of the word reveals the inherent challenge: we make these names; we don’t simply discover them pre-existing in nature. Despite our deep-seated desire to know things as they truly are, our linguistic efforts to name and define them are always, inevitably, approximations. Yet, this drive to understand and label the world persists. “What is your sound… Will we ever know,” the lead singer croons, lamenting (or perhaps celebrating) the enduring mystery of the fox’s true vocalization, something that “will always be a mystery.” In this light, the “What Does the Fox Say?” song and video, far from being mere internet fluff, genuinely engages with existential questions that have occupied philosophers and poets for centuries, all wrapped up in a hilariously catchy tune about animal noises.
