Girls Laughing

About

"Girls Laughing" (also known as "Laughing Whores") refers to a series of reaction images typically depicting two or more young women laughing or snickering at something. These images are commonly used as replies on imageboards to mock or dismiss original poster's thread, asserting that the post contains a story or anecdote implying that the poster is pathetic or inadequate. Though the intentions can be similar to the usage of Facepalm or George Costanza's Reaction Face, it is more disparaging as the images tend to imply the women are retelling the story in a humorous manner to their friends.

Origin

The earliest known use of Girls Laughing response images appeared in a thread^[1] on 4chan's /tv/ (Television) board on August 4th, 2009. After the original poster asked for opinions about the 1954 drama teleplay 12 Angry Men, a series of different images of women laughing paired with green text captions were used to criticize the OP's positive opinion of the movie. Though many different photos are used, the photo that is most often associated with this practice, used in in the first reply, is a Getty Images^[2] stock photo titled "Young Women Laughing in a Photo Booth."

Spread

Since early August 2009, several stock photographs depicting women laughing have been used as discouraging reaction images in dozens of threads over several imageboards, including /r9k/^[4] (ROBOT 9000), /sp/^[3] (Sports), /b/^[5] (Random) and /vp/ (Pokemon) among others. The image of the two girls in the photo booth has also been used on Meme Generator^[6] as "Laughing Whores" and Quickmeme^[7] as "Laughing Girls" where it has been turned into an image macro series. The reactions images also are used on Tumblr with the tag "girls laughing."^[8] In August 2011, Uproxx^[9] posted a collection with 11 girls laughing reaction photos.

Notable Examples

Derivatives

Derivative illustrations of girls laughing with captions intending to emasculate or criticize males have also appeared. For example, in replying to a discussion thread about Pokemon, the laughing girls would be drawn to resemble that of female Pokemon characters.

Vindictive Girls

In April 2012, a new image macro series dubbed "Vindictive Girls" (shown below, left) featuring a photograph of three women in party dresses laughing with each others began appearing on Reddit. While the captions bear many similarities to the rest of "Girls Laughing" reaction images, this particular offshoot series opens with "So Then I Told Him" or "And Then I Said…" (shown below, left) taken from a similar image macro series featuring a stock photo of adult white men laughing. One of the earliest posts featuring this series was posted to /r/AdviceAnimals^[12] on April 10th, 2012.

Between April 11th and 13th, 2012, compilations of the Vindictive Girls series were shared on humor sites Pleated Jeans^[13], eBaum's World^[14], Izismile^[15], Damn Cool Pictures^[16] and Acid Cow.^[17] As of February 2013, there are nearly 1000 submissions to the Vindictive Girls page on Quickmeme^[10] and approximately 50 submissions titled "Vindictive Girls" on the Advice Animals subreddit.^[11]

Kumoi Girls

Kumoi Girls is a girls laughing stylish exploitable image fad comes from a hentai manga. It is mostly known in the eastern web, such as 2channel or other japanese online forums.

Search Interest

External References