Fan fascination with the Portman video is representative of a more general online obsession with making laugh-loops, which appear all over the Internet primarily in animated GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) form. An animated gif is a short sequence of images sliced from their original context, usually programmed to loop ad infinitum, or at least until you close your browser. A truly democratic animal that lives and dies by its rebloggability, the GIF is popular because of its simplicity and portability - they are easy to make and even easier to spread.

But why is the laugh-loop in particular such a popular variety of GIF? A quick scan of the vast array of laugh-loop GIFs show that the laughter chosen for looping has no single identifiable quality. Some are contagious and pleasurable to listen to, but some are uncomfortable and jarring to the ear. Many don't include an audio track at all, featuring only the mute face crumpling in silent spasms that we infer to be laughter. Most noticeable, however, is the variety of subjects doing the laughing in laugh-loops. Natalie Portman, Michael Jordan, and Brendan Fraser star in very popular laugh-loops. However, equally prevalent are laugh-loop GIFs that feature non-celebrities, children, cartoon characters, puppets, and animals.

Aristotle called laughter an "ensouling mechanism," and the academic discipline of humor studies has built itself upon the assumption that laughter is a quintessentially human response to the socio-cultural discourse of humor. Laughter is offered as proof of our exceptional status as thinking social creatures; we are "the only animal that laughs." GIFs that feature sniggering squirrels, cackling cartoon toasters, and rollicking robots would seem to undermine this selfish view of laughter as an exclusively human activity. But even worse, the laugh-loop GIF disassociates laughter from humor. By severing laughter from the context that incites it, the laugh-loop GIF reveals that laughter is not only a consequence of its sociocultural coordinates, but also a weird object in itself. Laughter, it seems, is not 'for us' but has its own alien being that has hitherto been masked by its everydayness.

The glitch aesthetic of the GIF emphasizes the uncanny quality of laughter. At each moment of re-looping, Portman performs a miniature convulsion that registers as an inhuman twitch. If humor makes us human -- an assumed correlation that is so deeply written into our culture that the two share a basic etymological root -- then laughter without humor appears to render us mechanical, terrifying, monstrous. It is not a coincidence that laughter without humor has become the great cinematic signifier of madness: think of Colin Clive's maniacal "it's alive!" hysterics in the famous 1931 film version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the crazed cackle of The Joker in the Batman comics.

Lion's Gate

Laughter without humor seems pathological because it cannot be rationalized. Without the Millepied joke as context, Portman's laughter literally becomes unintelligible to us. The laugh-loop GIF replaces humor studies' anthropocentric question -- what is funny to us? -- with a more basic one: what is laughter? The laughter of the laugh-loop GIF is both infinite and inexplicable, it erupts over and over again, without reason and without end. In the same way that repeating a common word over and over suddenly renders it strange, the repetitious format of the laugh-loop GIF defamiliarizes laughter and forces us to confront it as such, in all its irrational strangeness.