Laughing Tom Cruise

Origin: two separate sources¶

The meme runs on two artifacts that most people have long since merged into one.

The still image — Cruise doubled over, mouth wide, eyes shut — was taken on March 21, 2006 at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, during an on-stage appearance by the actor. Photographer Mitch Aidelbaum uploaded it to Flickr under the title “The famous Cruise laugh,” and at least two other attendees posted their own shots of the same moment that day. It is not a still from Tropic Thunder, and it is not from a talk show or a press junket, both of which are commonly and incorrectly cited.

The video — the laugh people actually quote — came from somewhere else entirely. A roughly nine-and-a-half-minute Church of Scientology internal promotional video produced in 2004, featuring an interview with Cruise scored to the Mission: Impossible theme, was leaked to YouTube on January 14, 2008 and hosted by Gawker. Cruise’s laugh punctuates it repeatedly. The organisation’s takedown campaign against the clip drove far more attention to it than the leak alone would have, and is generally credited with triggering the imageboard-organised protest campaign known as Project Chanology.

Becoming a meme¶

The format assembled itself over five years:

• January 16, 2008 — YouTuber Suburban Hicks posts “Tom Cruise Maniac Laugh (REMIX),” isolating and looping the laugh. It reportedly passed 250,000 views.
• April 20, 2008 — Funny or Die publishes “The Ultimate ‘Laughing Tom Cruise’ Viral,” intercutting the clip with other people laughing maniacally.
• July 13, 2011 — the 2006 Yahoo still is published as a standalone reaction face, detached from any video.
• December 2012 to March 2013 — a Facebook community page, a MemeGenerator template and a dedicated Tumblr blog appear within three months of each other.

That last cluster is why the meme is usually dated to around 2013. By then it had stopped being about any specific footage and become a general-purpose reaction: a laugh so total that it does the job of a sentence.

Meaning and usage¶

The clip is deployed as a response to something considered hilarious or absurd, but the intensity gives it two readings. Used sincerely it signals genuine, helpless delight. Used flatly against a bad post it becomes pointed mockery — the laugh is so disproportionate that it reads as a comment on the thing being laughed at rather than an honest reaction to it. That ambiguity is the whole utility. Common forms include the looping video reply, the mid-laugh still as a static reaction image, and music edits built around the rhythm of the laugh, which is unusually percussive and loops cleanly.

Cruise and his memes¶

Cruise has generally responded to internet jokes about himself with visible good humour. On June 13, 2017, on BBC Radio 1’s “Movies that Made Me,” interviewer Ali Plumb showed him a different meme entirely — the #TomCruiseClinging compilation of him hanging off aircraft, buildings and vehicles. Cruise laughed at it and said it was fantastic, and asked why nobody had shown it to him before.

Legacy¶

As a video reaction the clip has largely been replaced by shorter, faster reaction GIFs, and the Scientology promotional video that carried it is now mostly of interest to internet historians rather than meme posters. The still, though, has stayed in circulation for close to two decades — an ordinary press-event photograph from 2006 that has outlived the context it was taken in.