Laurence Fishburne Stare / Ike Turner Turning

About

Laurence Fishburne Stare, also known as Ike Turner Turning Around, is a reaction image and exploitable meme template featuring the actor Laurence Fishburne dressed up as Ike Turner in the 1993 movie What's Love Go To Do With It? (a film about Tina Turner's childhood). The stare was originally used as more of a reaction upon seeing something sus, but it quickly turned into its own individual meme based on either the context or the look of the stare.

Origin

The 1993 film What's Love Got To Do With It is about the rise and stardom of Tina Turner, as well as her relationship with Ike Turner, who was a serial abuser and physical wifebeater, played by Laurence Fishburne. This background knowledge of the character is utilized in some memes by having the context involve an abusive partner, but eventually, the meme was watered down to more generic uses. The screen capture of the stare in question comes from the River Deep Mountain High portion, which was uploaded to YouTube^[1] by the channel PJJ on July 27th, 2015, and gained over 490,000 views in seven years (shown below).

Though used as a generic reaction image for years online, the first instance of Laurence Fishburne's stare being used as a meme was uploaded to Imgur by an anonymous user on March 25th, 2016^[2], with the caption being about a cheating girlfriend. This meme caption would effectively make it a double-entendre; the meme earns its meaning from both the stare of a surprised boyfriend, as well as the potential reaction being a physical one due to Ike Turner being the pictured character (shown below).

Spread

After being used in its first meme, the stare was quickly adopted and used in several more posts, often spread around sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and iFunny. In 2018, the site Imgflip added the blank template of the stare to the site, allowing memes to be quickly made of it. Later in that year, the imgflip user Saglove^[3] made a meme with a role reversal of the character, from a girl's perspective of being about to fight her man after he asked her for some of her food (shown below).

On December 23rd, 2019, an example of the meme being detached from the additional context of the character, focusing entirely on the stare, was uploaded to the /r/Pewdiepiesubmissions subreddit by the user u/the_G_killer^[4], where it went on to get over 200 upvotes in three years (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References