Eduardo Sterblitch Laugh

Submission 23,556

Part of a series on Reaction Images. [View Related Entries]

About

Eduardo Sterblitch Laugh refers to a video of Brazilian actor and comedian Eduardo Sterblitch struggling not to laugh and then breaking from a 2016 episode of the talk show Programa do Jô. The video became the subject of memes, particularly image macros and as a reaction GIF as early as 2017 in Brazil, seeing a revival on Reddit in mid-2021 with English-speaking web users.

Origin

On November 1st, 2016, the Brazilian late-night talk show Programa do Jô had comedian Eduardo Sterblitch on for an interview. At the 9:29 mark in the interview (shown below) the host talks up Sterblitch's camera presence and begins a slow zoom-in to jokingly demonstrate it. Sterblich tries to keep a straight face as the host jokes with him, but he breaks into a large smile. The video gained over 174,000 views on YouTube^[1] in five years.

A screenshot and GIF of the video started spreading online as early as 2017 through South America. For example, in 2017 memer @sentoavara posted a now-deleted Portuguese image macro using the screenshot (shown below).

The clip was cut and added to GFYcat^[2] on May 22nd of 2017. It was added to Tenor^[3] in 2018 (shown below).

Spread

The clip spread across Portuguese-speaking social media over the course of the following years, seeing use in image macros, and as a reaction image on Twitter, used to show the struggle not to laugh at something inappropriate.^[4]

On June 27th, 2021, Redditor Shoe_Bum_ posted an image macro to /r/memes^[5] using the GIF of Sterblitch smiling to make a joke about hiding your laughter when watching a sex scene on a film with your parents, garnering over 11,000 upvotes in a month (shown below).

On July 19th, Redditor Paper-Cup posted a new image macro using the GIF in the same way to /r/memes,^[6] garnering over 82,000 upvotes in four days (shown below, left). On the same day, Fandayo posted another meme using the GIF to /r/memes,^[7] garnering over 19,000 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below, right).