The “cry laughing” emoji has been my nemesis for as long as I can remember. Officially titled Face with Tears of Joy, it’s been tainted by years of misuse and overuse. Its spiritual home is Facebook, where it has flooded the comment sections of inane status updates and four-month-old memes, posted as if brand new. Cry laughing has flourished too on WhatsApp, accompanying the video you received from your auntie Mary, ominously flagged as having been “forwarded many times”.
At worst the manic, scrunched, teary face has been adopted by the radicalised sections of the internet – the transphobes, the conspiracy theorists, the rabid patriots. Most recently it made headlines when Elon Musk posted it on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a tweet about a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against him over severance pay. At best it’s been the calling card of “gas tickets” on social media who share “hilarious” videos about men who hate their wives and women who lose their minds after a glass of rosé.
Generation Z have long slagged off cry laughing as a millennial favourite which, as a discerning emoji user and elder millennial, made me bristle. Yes, cry laughing has been weaponised by the wine o’clock millennials, but it’s also even more present in the “recently used” emoji sections on the phones of Gen Xers and the Facebook-loving Boomers. Simply put, it’s been tainted. It’s been so diluted that it bears no resemblance to the action of weeping with mirth. Demonstrably, the cry laughing emoji has tormented so many for so long, none more so than myself. Why then, do I now find myself softening towards it?
I can think of at least three occasions in the past month where I’ve clicked cry laughing – or its inexplicably more tolerable tilted cry laughing brother – in response to a text. I haven’t done it to be passive-aggressive. I’m not using it ironically. I’m merely following the path of least resistance. I’m letting the texter know that I’m coming back with a “Hah! That was funny”, or a “That’s wild, we both think your dog looks like Enya!”. Have I been literally crying laughing on any of these occasions? No. Cry laughing is a sacred state reserved for that time your friend accidentally made a funny noise with her nose, or a TikTok about a cat who’s afraid of the wind. Traditionally I would have used an unironic “lol” (or the upper case “LOL” depending on the veracity of the lol) but perhaps it’s just time to get out of my own way and embrace cry laughing.
. Gen Z won’t be the arbiters of what acceptable emoji use is for much longer. The oldest members of Generation Alpha are heading into their mid-teens, and they will take no prisoners
I hardly spend any time on X/Twitter any more, so my exposure to egregious uses of the cry laughing emoji has gone way down. With fewer tedious trolls throwing it into my timeline the hysterical yellow buffoon has softened a little, and the emoji is being allowed to return to its pure form. It may also be that the wearing down of emoji cynicism is just a modern sign of ageing, along with refusing to sit on high stools and fretting that every ache, pain and episode of blurry vision is another step into Sniper Alley, the metaphorical health gauntlet you run through between the ages of 45 and 60.
Emojis wield incredible power, so it’s not a folly to scrutinise them in this manner. Last week Apple was forced to address what it said was a bug that inserted a Palestinian flag emoji when some users typed the word “Jerusalem”. Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly almost brought the innocuous thumbs-up emoji to its knees at the height of the pandemic when he used it as a seemingly dismissive response to then CMO Dr Tony Holohan’s text about rising case numbers in Dublin. Future anthropologists will study how early 21st-century emoji use delineated generational, class and geographical divides. Gen Z won’t be the arbiters of what acceptable emoji use is for much longer. The oldest members of Generation Alpha are heading into their mid-teens, and they will take no prisoners.
And with cry laughing potentially coming out of the sin bin, what are the emojis that should remain sidelined? Clown face has long been the embarrassing representative of the gender-critical movement. The see-no-evil monkey has been overused as a symbol for “I’m mad, me” or “I’m a silly billy” and needs to be retired. And don’t get me started on the big eyes welling up emoji. That’s a whole other column.