A huge mosquito bit my foot

Origin

“A huge mosquito bit my foot” is a song from episode 4 of the MBC sitcom High Kick Through the Roof. The clip posted by MBC’s official channel dates the broadcast to 10 September 2009. Lee Kwang-soo’s character is written as an aspiring entertainer, so he practices dancing alone — and the song he performs in that scene is his own composition.

The lyrics run: “A huge mosquito bit my foot! It itched! Without thinking I scratched my foot! It itched! So I held back! It itched!” The content amounts to nothing more than being bitten by a mosquito and finding it itchy, but the melody and choreography are played entirely straight. The comedy comes from that mismatch between how trivial the subject is and how seriously it is performed.

Spread

The scene drew almost no reaction when it aired. It was short, and in 2009 Lee Kwang-soo was still close to unknown. It became a meme much later, and unusually, in two distinct stages. First, once Lee had built a profile through variety shows, viewers combing through his earlier work unearthed the scene. Then YouTubers began building content around the mosquito dance, sending it back up a second time. That second revival is largely why parodies were still appearing more than a decade after broadcast.

He eventually embraced it himself. On the 31 January 2021 episode of SBS’s Running Man, Ji Suk-jin performed his own reworking of the mosquito song with Jeon So-min as a backup dancer, prompting Lee to answer with a 2021 “NEW mosquito song” of his own in a head-to-head bit. A scene being recycled as variety-show material is a fair measure of how firmly it had landed.

The best-known derivative is “Lee Kwang-soo and the Curse of the Mosquito” by the YouTuber Ppalgan Naebok Yako. It sets the original lyrics to a 1990s trance arrangement, inflating the mosquito grievance into rage, and because the title differs it is often mistaken for the original song’s name. This entry concerns the original song from the sitcom; “Curse of the Mosquito” is a separate derivative work built from it.

How it is used

The lyrics themselves serve as a form. The structure — solemnly reporting a minor discomfort as a song — makes them easy to quote outright, or to refit with a different grievance.

Quoted reflexively whenever the topic of mosquito bites comes up.
Refitted as “A huge [X] bit my [Y]” with the target swapped out.
Used to label any situation where something trivial is reported with a straight face.
Cited as the standard example of footage from an actor’s unknown years being unearthed long after the fact.