[Laughs / Cries in ___ ]

Definition:

“[Laughs / Cries in ___ ]” refers to a series of images / screenshots with the snowclone “[X in Y language]” meant to subtitle the image… where X is replaced with a universal noise or emotive action that does not need language clarification (often “Laughs” or “Cries,” but not limited to those), and Y is humorously replaced with a related language (e.g. “Spanish”).

Context:

The meme is an evolution of “Descriptive Noise” – a meme genre mocking subtitles that humorously describe the audio of the accompanying image (e.g. “[ indistinct mumbling ]”).

On November 27th, 2014, a redditor in /r/funny submitted a screenshot image of a teary-eyed Soraya (from the popular Mexican telenovela María la del Barrio) with the audio-descriptive English subtitle reading "[CRIES IN SPANISH]" and the post titled "Have you ever been so mad you cried in Spanish?"...

...it subsequently went viral.

Since then, many meme variations in the form of “[X in Y language]” have emerged. Typically you see this only in social media comments or online forum posts… although on rare occasions, you may hear someone ironically use it verbally in conversation.

Example:

^{(for legal
reasons, all names & events in the following scenario have been made
up)}

Huan: “man… at this rate, AI is gonna take my job”

ChatGPT: “[laughs in binary]”

Fun Fact:

“Snowclones” are a type of phrasal templates in which certain words may be replaced with another to produce new variations with altered meanings (e.g. “X is the new Y”), similar to the "fill-in-the-blank" game of Mad Libs. The term "snowclone" was coined by American linguists Geoffrey K. Pullum and Glen Whitman through a series of short columns published in 2004. Pullum continued his documentation project for several years, accumulating more than 70 widespread examples of snowclone phrases, including "You can call it X all you want" and "Putting the X in Y" among many others.

Other notable examples (see Snowclones Database):

To X or not to X?
X is my middle name
The X to End All Xs
X’ers Gonna X

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ZACH GEORGE † Software Engineer

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