Before July 15, 2012, the idea of an Asian man wearing a tuxedo and dancing like a horse would have been met by mocking chuckles and derision. Since that date, the concept has produced not only amused laughter but also has more than 800 million views on YouTube, catapulting it to become the most watched video of all time. The video in question is, you guessed it: Gangnam Style.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Gangnam Style is a Korean pop song (also known as K-Pop) by the South Korean music artist known as Psy. In this music video, Psy prances around the Gangnam District of Seoul, a high-end area of South Korea on which the song is based. He performs a simple dance inspired by horse movements to a catchy tune sung almost entirely in Korean, except for the phrase “Eh, sexy ladies.”

When I first saw this video, I thought it was very funny and different, but nothing special. It was comparable to Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video in the sense that it was hilarious to watch, inspired many parodies, and was popular for a while until the hype died down. The hype for Psy’s video, however, has still not abated. Currently, “Gangnam Style” is the most-liked video on YouTube, as well as the most watched. Countless spoofs have appeared, including a “Mitt Romney Style,” a “Gandalf Style” and a flash mob dance to the song performed by Cornell University students. Psy has appeared on multiple television programs, including The Today Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Saturday Night Live. And to top this list of achievements, ChannelMeter, a website that analyzes YouTube channels, predicts that the video will be the first to achieve 1 billion views.

Let me repeat that: the crazy video about a dancing Korean man in a baby blue tux is projected to reach a billion views, probably before the end of the year. I was shocked when I heard this statistic; I mean, yes, I thought it was hilarious, but I didn’t think it would reach that level of popularity.

Obviously I was wrong. From a survey of 150 Grady students, 81 percent had at least heard of “Gangnam Style,” and 71 percent had actually seen the video. The video is watched a couple million times per day, and was viewed more than 100 million times in less than two weeks. But when 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, why is this one video in particular so popular?

Brent Coker, an Internet consumer psychologist, may have the answer. He reasons that in order for a video to truly be viral, it must invoke a viewer’s curiosity and motive-to-share. Coker explained that to achieve curiosity, the video must control emotion and keep a viewer’s attention, something that can be achieved by balancing pleasure (humor, cuteness, or amazement) and shock (anticipation, surprise, or embarrassment). To inspire a viewer’s motive-to-share, the video should utilize message congruency, which is done by relating to the audience and exhibiting extreme facial expressions. And believe me, Psy makes some pretty crazy faces.

“Gangnam Style” employs all of these techniques, so perhaps that is why it has attained such success. Maybe we’ll never truly know why the video has exploded on the Internet, the song’s catchy tune has stuck in millions of peoples’ heads, and the iconic dance has been performed by thousands. Maybe we should just sit back and watch the video one more time. Maybe we should just embrace the funny, weird, and unique song, and simply say to ourselves, “Oppa Gangnam Style.”