I first heard about this video on Garry Meier’s show recently. Now it’s everywhere:

An exquisite snippet — the one Colbert played the other night — is at this link.  Blogger Justin E. H. Smith has the story:

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль…

The song he is interpreting, “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” is … meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. …

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. (Zorn note — a commenter suggests Hill bears a resemblance to Bob, the guy in the Enzyte commercials, right)

But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it’s-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please –to genuinely please– Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context. …

To my mind, if there is a stroke of brilliance in this performance, it is the genial wave Hill gives to the audience as he exits ….

Hill hasn’t said anything, yet he bids farewell as if he has. What bit of reality is this meant to reproduce?

Smith also unearths a cinematic and less loopy version of this same song as performed by Muslim Magomaev, arguably the worst fake whistler ever to grace the silver screen: