About
Laughing Tom Cruise is a reaction image and exploitable meme involving collage pictures featuring various surimposed faces of Tom Cruise maniacally laughing. First used as a reaction face to express hilarity, the meme expanded itself by covering other public figures, anime characters and eventually having its own memegenerator macro.
Origin
Following the leaked video of an interview with Tom Cruise about Scientology during Project Chanology, thus as early as 2008, remixed containing only the segment in which the actor can be seen laughing began to appear on Youtube (shown below):
Because of Cruise’s public image, videos and photographs of him laughing hysterically became associated with him. On peculiar photo, taken during a Yahoo conference in March 2006[1], would stand out:
Spread
The photograph was then modified to include two other faces laughing (shown below). This version would then be used as an Advice Animal macro on memegenerator, starting on december 15th 2012[2], displaying over 165 pages of variations to date.
A wikia page[5] on the macro phenomenon shows that it gained momentum among Spanish netizens under the name Laughing Tom. It also inspired two different tumblr sites dedicated to the phenomenon, one about Tom Cruise specifically[3] and the other about anime variations on the meme[4].
Examples
Parodies
Macros
External References
[1]Flickr – The famous Cruise laugh
[2]Meme Generator – Tom Cruise Laugh
[3]Tumblr – Tom Cruise laughing
[4]Tumblr – Anime Themed Tom Cruise laughing memes
[5]Wikia – Laughing Tom