About
Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing is an image macro of Calvin Candie played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2012 film Django Unchained which features the character smiling while holding a drink. The image gained Photoshop edits starting in November 2017 and became a popular reaction image in August 2020 on Reddit.
Origin
On November 7th, 2017, Tumblr user schuetzengrabenmints posted the earliest known usage of the image macro which added a monster energy drink (shown below). The post, captioned, “Get a load of this tumblr user. FRENCH!” that was a response to pianoplayersara saying she wished the national language was French, gained over 920 notes in three years.
Spread
On January 29th, 2020, Redditor babyyoda1203 posted the image with DiCaprio holding a Dairy Queen Blizzard upside down captioned, “Dairy Queen employees be like” to r/dairyqueen (shown below, left). On June 17th, Redditor SecretAgent9090 posted an unedited captioned version to r/dndmemes and received over 40,400 points (96% upvoted) in two months (shown below, right).
In early August the meme saw a resurgence on Reddit. On August 4th, Redditor MohammedAzees posted the image to r/dankmemes captioned, “Mom: I deleted all your games in your PC * she actually deleted the desktop icons not the games * (shown below, left). The post accumulated over 25,300 points (96% upvoted) in two days. On August 5th, Instagram user worstigaccount posted a variation that garnered over 5,400 likes in a day (shown below, right). StayHipp published an article on the trend.
Various Examples
Templates
Search Interest
Know Your Meme Store
External References
Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leonardo-dicaprio-laughing