For years, he would record the sound whenever he heard it. His coinage started to catch on, thanks to those who were grateful to have a name for their affliction. “One day I was briefly on the front page of Reddit and the demand was so big my hosting service shut me down,” Paget says. What started as a hobby became something that united disgruntled media consumers across the globe. “I enjoy it when I see people use the word on other Web sites, even if they don’t link to the blog,” he says. “Just to see someone asking, ‘What’s this annoying sound?’ and have someone say, ‘Yeah, that’s the Diddy Laugh.’ I think that’s funny.”

Considering the popularity of the sound, its origins are still a mystery, even to the editors who keep using it. The man who selected all the sound effects for Diddy Kong Racing, the composer Graeme Norgate, found it in a collection by a company called the Hollywood Edge; officially, it was called “Two Young Kids Giggle,” he explains via e-mail. Chris Stamper, then the co-director of the video-game publisher Rare, along with his brother Tim Stamper, wanted to convey that Diddy Kong Racing was a family game, so he requested Norgate open it with the sound of children laughing.

“I opted to use the library sound as a placeholder and planned to record another director of Rare, Tim Stamper’s children at a later time,” Norgate explains. “As is so often the case, time ran out on the project, and the temp sounds stayed.”

For the last two decades, he’s had no idea that people have been calling it the Diddy Laugh, which he finds both “funny” and amazing.

The sound has remained prevalent because there’s a dearth of solid effects of children laughing, Paget says. Editors are often “pushed for time,” he says, and many child laughter effects sound phony. “Think about something like the Wilhelm Scream,” he says. “How hard can it be to record a bloke screaming? You could literally walk out of the studio door, grab any person working in the offices, and get them to pop into the booth and act like he’s been shot. But to get kids laughing takes time and preparation. Someone’s got to take them out of school and bring them in . . . then you have to prompt them to laugh.”

Using the Diddy Laugh is much simpler and it sounds “reasonably genuine”—which is why it gets selected time and time again.

In 2014, the Hollywood Edge filed for bankruptcy. Its library was acquired the next year by a Toronto-based library called Sound Ideas, which has collaborated with companies like Hanna-Barbera, Lucasfilm, and Warner Bros. It also has the rights to the Diddy Laugh, according to President and C.E.O. Brian Nimens. But like Norgate, he wasn’t aware that the sound was so popular, or that it had an oft-used nickname. He also doesn’t know how to track the sound’s origin. “Hollywood Edge did not create detailed lists of where each sound came from,” he explains. “The sound was never watermarked, so it’s literally impossible to track.” Knowing this strikes up a rather morbid image of the Chuck Palahniuk variety: “Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s,” he wrote in his 2002 novel Lullaby. “These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

In search of the sound’s origin, Nimens reached out to another sound editor friend, John Moran, who used to work for the Hollywood Edge and now works in sound-effects sales and licensing at the company Sounddogs.

Moran also couldn’t track where the Diddy Laugh came from, but he theorizes that the Diddy Laughers themselves were children of employees at the parent company Soundelux. “We would use employees since we couldn’t use union actors,” he explains. Paget wonders if those kids are still out there somewhere, if they could possibly be aware of just how “famous” they are.

The Diddy Laugh isn’t as notorious as the Wilhelm Scream, a sound that’s become something of an insider nod. For years now, using the effect has been “an act of tribute,” he says. “It’s the sound artist saying, ‘This is a joke. You know it, and we know you know it.’”

Maybe one day, the Diddy Laugh will become something similar—evolve from a secret punchline to an inside joke. Until then, it’s still echoing around the ephemera of pop culture, pushing certain viewers to race to the Internet and ask each other the same question: “Did you hear that?”