Little Bunny Foo Foo

This is really a little morality play with actions. Bunny Foo Foo hops through the forest doing something he shouldn’t — scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head — and a good fairy keeps swooping down to warn him off, offering three chances. He wastes every one, so at last she makes good on her threat and turns him, POOF, into a “goon”. The classic ending delivers the groan-worthy pun the whole thing is built toward: hare today, goon tomorrow.

For all its playground familiarity, it is a modern song, and nobody knows where it came from. The linguist Neal Whitman, who went looking, found nothing earlier than 1970: that year it turns up in Beverly Cleary’s novel Runaway Ralph, where a boy at summer camp sings “Little Rabbit Fru-Fru”, and in The New Yorker, which mentions “little Bunny Phoo Phoo” as a character in a children’s story. Both are American publications, and people remember singing it in the 1960s, but that is as far as the trail goes. There is no ancient pedigree, despite a much-repeated online claim that it turns up in Chaucer or Shakespeare: that began as a joke on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban in 1997, where fake “early” versions were written into famous texts. Its melody, on the other hand, is genuinely old: the verses are chanted to the tune of the French-Canadian song “Alouette”. Between the hopping, the bopping, the finger-wagging fairy and the final transformation, it gives children a small, satisfying lesson — that bullying the smaller creatures does not, in the end, go unpunished.