Laughing Theresa May

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Part of a series on Theresa May. [View Related Entries]

About

Laughing Theresa May refers to a video clip of United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May laughing at the British House of Commons in early March 2017. Online, GIFs of May laughing were widely circulated on Reddit and Twitter, with many mocking her for appearing villainous.

Origin

On March 8th, 2017, May was filmed throwing her head back and laughing while Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn criticized her in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom (shown below).

Shortly after, Twitter user @youngvulgarian^[1] tweeted the clip of May laughing along with the message "What the hell was that" (shown below). Within 24 hours, the tweet gained over 1,800 likes and 1,500 retweets.

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT pic.twitter.com/M8OB2y40vo
— Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) March 8, 2017

Spread

That morning, Twitter user @davidsonhrj^[8] posted an edited version of the clip in which May is shown swallowing a fish, which received more than 18,000 likes and 14,000 retweets in 24 hours (shown below).

Throughout the day, other Twitter users posted tweets mocking May's laugh for appearing villainous (shown below). Meanwhile, the original clip reached the front page of both /r/BetterEveryLoop^[7] and the fish GIF reached the front page of /r/gifs.^[6]

Also on March 8th, Redditor Lazzars uploaded a glitched version of the laughing clip to /r/brokengifs^[2] (shown below). In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online reaction to the video clip, including The Sun,^[3] The Daily Mail^[4] and Mashable.^[5]