Meaning
What does Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing mean?
Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing refers to an image macro of the character Calvin Candie, played by the aforementioned world famous actor in the 2012 Tarantino film, Django Unchained.
The meme depicts the character with an uncanny smile, holding a glass of wine in his hand, while sticking his tongue out.
Online, it has been used as a reaction image for wild jokes, as well as a photoshop exploitable, turning up in a wide variety of contexts.
Origin
What's the origin of Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing?
The face appeared before audiences in 2012, when Django Unchained was presented to the world, premiering in the United States on December 11th.
In one of the scenes, Calvin Candie is dining with his guests, Django and Dr. King Schultz (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz respectively) when Calvin makes a joke about bostoner accent, displaying the well known face from the meme.
An isolated clip of the scene was uploaded to YouTube by user Frdnsyh on August 15th, 2020, with the title LEONARDO DICAPRIO LAUGHING MEME SCENE DJANGO UNCHAINED.
It took the scene five years, until it was first used on the internet, as a reaction image; its first use can be traced back to Tumblr, where a few users were talking about how German was almost adopted as the official language of America.
One of the users expressed, how they wished it was French, to which another user, with the name schuetzengrabenmints replied with “Get a load of this tumblr user. FRENCH!” and the first instance of “Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing”, holding a Monster energy drink, instead of wine.
Spread & Usage
How did Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing spread?
The image macro appeared again in January, 2020 in a Reddit post, uploaded to the r/dairyqueen sub, and by August, 2020 it started emerging in more and more memes, both on Reddit and later on other sites.
The image macro had become one of the most iconic memes of 2020, by the end of August it surfaced on every platform people use to get their daily dose of memes, including Facebook, 9GAG and Instagram, as well as Imgur, Tumblr and Twitter.
“Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing” turned out to be such a popular meme in 2020, that it quickly spawned another image macro meme depicting the actor: You Will?