The Chinese government has also been paying attention to the Psy phenomenon. Even the government of North Korea, whose average citizen has no access to the Internet and no knowledge of YouTube, has gotten in on the joke, releasing a () that makes fun of the conservative South Korean Presidential candidate Park Geun-hye by pasting her face on an image of a body in horse-trotting position.

But the humorous-depiction-of-a-subculture format has provided an easy platform for cultural spoofing-“ Eastern Europe Style,” “ Jewish Style,” “ London Style”-and the lyrics of the original, indecipherable to non-Korean speakers, have inspired a subset of phonetically oriented videos, most notably “ Hot Dog Condom Style,” which is worth watching if (and only if) you want to see condom-wrapped hot dogs used as dance props. (The song’s lyrics probably do, too, but having no clue what they say is part of the fun.) Several parodies of Psy’s version have taken up the theme of skewering the rich or powerful, as in “ Mitt Romney Style,” made by the site College Humor, and “ Kim Jong Style” (Un, not Il, “sorry for the confusion”), by the YouTube channel Barely Political. Psy’s original video is, itself, a sort of parody-“Gangnam” is the name of a district known as the Beverly Hills of Seoul, and Psy’s video, with its snippets of horse stables, girls in yoga class, and dudes in a sauna and jacuzzi, pokes fun at the luxurious lifestyle of the South Korean élite. With over half a billion views on YouTube (and, according to the Guinness World Records, the most “likes” of any video in the history of the site), Psy’s loony, frenetic, infectious dance video has spawned a Jepsenesque number of knockoffs since its release last July. Ai’s was far from the first video of its kind. The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei horse-trot danced across the Internet yesterday in a parody video, recorded in his Beijing studio and posted Wednesday on YouTube, of the K-pop artist Psy’s “ Gangnam Style” music video.

Gangnam style music video