Laughing Nervously What the Fuck
Contents
About
“Laughing Nervously What the Fuck” is a reaction image and image macro built on a still from the HBO comedy Veep. It shows Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, grinning over her shoulder with the burned-in subtitle "(LAUGHING NERVOUSLY) What the fuck?" People put a line of setup text above the still, and the subtitle does the punchline. It shows up mostly on Reddit, X and Tumblr.
Origin
The scene is from "Hostages," the third episode of the show's second season, which aired on April 28th, 2013. Selina, the vice president, visits the Marine Corps base at Quantico and gets offered a chance to fire a gun at a press event. She turns to her staff, smiles, laughs nervously and says, "What the fuck?"
The earliest known meme with the frame was posted by X user @amandamcoughlin on May 4th, 2016, as a reaction to Donald Trump's presidential run. A Tumblr repost on redwhiteandbluth the same day picked up more than 100,000 notes. Reddit kept the format going after that, with posts in /r/memes and /r/dankmemes about the English language, calendars that start on Sunday and LinkedIn job hunting each pulling in thousands of upvotes.
Meaning
The meme is for moments when something is weird, alarming or just wrong, but you still have to keep a polite face. The smile says "everything's fine" and the subtitle says what you're actually thinking.
It works as a plain reaction to a strange post or news story, and also as a setup format where the top text describes an awkward situation, like dealing with an odd coworker or reading a pandemic novel during a real pandemic.
Examples
Popularity
See also