Initially, a lyric video for "Fuck You" was released to
YouTube on August 19, 2010, featuring
kinetic typography, with the lyrics of the song appearing on different colored backgrounds with
film grain overlaid on the video. The same thing was done in the
German,
Japanese and
Spanish versions of the video, translating the lyrics, although the vocals remained in
English. The official music video was released on September 1, 2010. The video was directed by Matt Stawski and was filmed at Cadillac Jack's, a movie prop diner located in the Sun Valley area of
Los Angeles. Taking place in a
diner, the video chronicles Cee Lo's misadventures with a girl he has a crush on, known as "The Heartbreaker" throughout the video. In the beginning, a young Cee Lo goes into the diner with his parents and goes up to the Heartbreaker, who is sitting with another boy. He offers to let the Heartbreaker play with his toy
garbage truck, but she ignores him and walks away with the other boy, who has a toy
Ferrari F40. In his high school years, Cee Lo works at the diner as a dishwasher. He attempts to woo the Heartbreaker with a bouquet of flowers but slips on fries deliberately dropped by another boy. The flowers fly out of his hand and land on a much younger girl's lap. During his college years, Cee Lo studies in the diner with another woman implied to be his music tutor. He then attempts to woo the Heartbreaker by having the waitress draw a heart-shaped ketchup mark on her hot dog plate, but the Heartbreaker approaches him with a basket of fries and intentionally spills them on his shirt, leaving a large ketchup stain on it and causing the other diner patrons to laugh at him. Humiliated, Cee Lo then goes through an epiphany in his life and the video fast-forwards to the present day, when Cee Lo is now an adult known as "The Lady Killer" and has a fancy
Cadillac Eldorado with his backup singers in the back seat. He drives past the diner to find the Heartbreaker is now working there, sweeping the front entrance while others are dancing behind her. Cee Lo waves at the Heartbreaker before driving away. The final shot is of him waving at the camera and the words "The Lady Killer" appearing on screen, before the shot freezes, thus ending the video. The
radio edit version of the video contains re-shot elements that have been mixed with parts from the original, most notably when Cee Lo is on screen and he is singing alternative lyrics, but he is not shown singing the
clean lyrics in the titular chorus. Some parts of the video tend to freeze for a split second when a
bowdlerized lyric is being mouthed to prevent the lips from being read. At the start of the explicit version and clean version titled
FU, the mother of the young Cee Lo Green can be seen to look very shocked and taps him on the shoulder to make him turn around when he first swears. This does not happen in the clean version titled
Forget You. ==Commercial performance==