Eduard Khil

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2009 · YouTube, using a 1976 Soviet television clip · Also known as Trololol; Trololo guy; Mr Trololo; The Russian Rickroll; Edward Hill; I Am Very Glad, As I Am Finally Returning Back Home

What it is

A short clip from Soviet television, filmed in 1976, in which the baritone Eduard Khil stands on a studio set in a suit and sings a cheerful song with no words at all. He sings only syllables like "trololo" and "lalala", grinning, winking and swaying the whole way through. Online it became known as Trololo or the Russian Rickroll, and Khil became known as Mr Trololo.

Where it came from

The song was written by the Soviet composer Arkady Ostrovsky and reportedly once had lyrics that were dropped, which left the wordless version Khil sang on television. Someone uploaded the 1976 clip to YouTube, the video site, in 2009, and it spread widely in early 2010 as people passed the link around forums and message boards. The American comedian Stephen Colbert performed a parody of it on his TV show that year. Reporters found Khil, then in his seventies and living in St Petersburg, and he took it well, gave interviews and started using Mr Trololo as a stage name. He died in 2012.

Why it mattered

It became the second famous bait-and-switch video after the Rickroll, and it worked because the clip was impossible to look away from: a man singing nonsense with total sincerity and obvious joy. Most viewers outside Russia didn't know who he was or why there were no words, and the mystery helped. It also had an unusual ending. The man in the joke was alive, found out about it, enjoyed it and joined in, which turned a mocking prank into something closer to affection and gave a retired Soviet star a late international audience.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People happily turned a stranger's cheerful work from decades earlier into a prank without knowing a word he was singing. Once they learned he was real and pleased about it, the same crowd switched from laughing at him to cheering for him.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.