By Oscar Ponteri CM ’27

Graphic by Ginny O’Marah SC ’28

I remember it vaguely. At first, it was just one isolated TikTok slandering skinny jeans, but soon, more and more started popping up, taking aim at side parts, boomerangs, and then, the crying-laughing emoji. A young woman—maybe a few years older than me—nodded her head along to some viral sound, pointing to a caption above her head: “Do ppl still use the ‘😂’ emoji or is it a joke?” Another creator made a video talking about how he changed his user settings to ban the emoji from his comment section in an attempt to relinquish millennials from his page. I was a sophomore in high school and a frequent user of the crying-laughing emoji; at the time, I didn’t totally understand why the emoji was part of this assault on millennials. But, as a teenager keen to fit in with others, I quickly purged the symbol from my emoticon. It was not long until I became a judge of those who still used the crying-laughing emoji; “cringe,” I would think to myself, whenever I saw others use it. The mass-movement away from the emoji had made those who still used it quiet champions of counter-culture authenticity, but this was rarely acknowledged. Blissfully confident in my decision to follow the masses, I had no idea that—as I now believe—the death of the crying laughing emoji would become a critical (and potentially tragic) turning point in our generation’s lingustical, comedic, and emotional design. 

Soon after the TikTok crusade against millennial had concluded, leaders at the forefront of this cultural renaissance—namely attractive influencers who captivated large swaths of teenagers including myself—anointed two new emojis to take the place of the crying-laughing face: the sobbing and skull emojis. Here, it’s important to highlight the likeness and essence of the preceding crying-laughing emoji: the circular face is characterized by an ear-to-ear, mouth-open-wide smile, two tear drops leak from from joyful eyes, framed by raised eyebrows. The crying-laughing emoji is a sensible representation of unabashed happiness; a recreation of the rare and cherished act of laughing to the point of tears. Its replacement? The same circular face, mouth ajar, a river of tears draining from its pained eyes, and then, of course, the skull: death. A drastic change indeed. Now abandoning the happy-face family at the front of the Apple emoji-keyboard, when a friend sent me something funny, I locate the sobbing-face which sits between the “weary-face” and “cursing-face” on the Apple emoji-keyboard. For especially comedic moments, one may scroll all the way past the faces and into the realm of the supernatural, where the skull is situated amidst a strange crowd of foreboding symbols including an evil mask, a robot, and various clowns. With this strange and unexpected changing of the emoji-guard, laughter becomes symbolized by crying and death. 

The aesthetic dissonance introduced by the shift from the crying-laughing to sobbing and skull emojis carried an implicit yet powerful message: the tragic is comedic and the comedic is tragic. Instantaneously, the vast space between the two emotional realms collapsed. Now, one text conveying something saddening and another making a light joke could both be denoted by the same sobbing emoji. The recipient of the text may perhaps analyze the context and derive a specific meaning from the emoji (“oh, this is a sad sobbing face, not a funny one”), but, in many cases, contexts seem to blend together into an indistinguishable boiling pot of irony and comedic indifference. The versatility of the sobbing emoji is so immense, in fact, that it largely relieves the sender of conveying any authentic, specific emotion. 

As any linguist will tell you, language not only describes one’s world but influences it. The rise of the sobbing and skull emoji brought with it a new landscape of online comedy. Previously, content (perhaps a tweet, TikTok, or meme) was judged mainly on its ability to solicit the relatively specific emotion of happiness and laughter that would be worthy of the crying-laughing emoji. However, the ambiguity of the sobbing and skull emojis, which represent a hyperbolic spectrum of emotions, now lead us to judge content based on its level of emotional vulgarity altogether rather than its ability to elicit a specific emotion: the more happy, the more surprising, the more tragic, the better. The sobbing emoji became popular at the same time as my friends started sending Instagram Reels of violent car crashes to our groupchat and memes of political violence and “dark humor” started trending. Things that once found a home on the generally-shunned 4chan began to enter the mainstream as acceptable—even ‘funny’—content. Let me pause here to say that I am not arguing that the sobbing and skull emojis single-handedly pushed ‘dark comedy’ into the mainstream; at the very least, though, the introduction of these ambiguous emo-emojis is symbolic of a new era of increased cultural confusion between the unserious and serious. 

This fusion of tragedy and comedy is, in fact, more than just an online phenomenon. One of the days that I was writing this story, I tried to keep track of everything I laughed at outside of the content on my phone. The list included: Jimmy Carter’s death, a juvenile detention center, my difficult family dynamics, a woman who was having difficulty walking, and a list of heinous crimes that a local criminal committed. It’s not that I find these things funny (I don’t, and they’re not), but laughter was just the reaction this genre of tragedy triggered. In many ways, this psychosomatic retreat is the real life manifestation of the sobbing emoji: laughing at something troubling is, in many ways, just like pairing the sobbing face with an unfortunate text. While pleasant in the moment, the result of this misplaced laughter (the same as over text) might create a melting pot of emotional ambiguity that leaves us confused about how we actually feel. 

Perhaps, the shift to the sobbing and skull-face emojis was not the work of a few high-power TikTok influencers, but rather the natural reflection of an overwhelmed generation, seeking pleasure in painful times. While it’s momentarily relieving to take the edge off everyday tragedies by implicitly suggesting their comedic value with the additive of a simple symbol, it may not be the best idea in the long run. By further depriving everything from events in our day-to-day life to international news of meaning or distinct emotional character, one runs the risk of becoming agnostic and indifferent to tragedy altogether. (What ever happened to breathing techniques as a way to deal with stress??) Trivializing serious issues gives us the license to be joyful, but it provides us a path to not care. Finally, in instances of genuine laughter, reacting with the sobbing emoji pollutes our comedy by suggesting a tragic or sad component; funny moments become ironically sorrowful just the same as tragic moments become ironically funny. And, who are we in this age of tragedy to deprive ourselves of straight-up comedy? 

It’s time to find some buffer space between sadness  and joy, again. Let’s laugh when things are funny. And, in serious moments, let’s learn to hold a straight face again. Authenticity and emotional clarity is back. The crying-laughing emoji is in; the sobbing and skull emojis … out.