From 1987 to 1994, the laugh was appropriated by proponents of every new dance genre: hip-house, new beat, jungle, downtempo and Eurodance, whether pop dance masterpieces by Deee-Lite, S’Express and C+C Music Factory or sample-collage house tracks like Westbam’s “Disco Deutschland” and Simon Harris’s “Bass (How Low Can You Go).” Ultramagnetic MCs sprinkled it over three separate remixes. Pop singer Samantha Fox’s producers Full Force cashed in on its familiarity with American hit “I Wanna Have Some Fun” in 1988. (A year later, Fox returned the favor, and brought the laugh with her, by appearing on Full Force’s “All I Wanna Do.”) The giggle became overly persistent, its lack of context eventually so diluted that it become the signature sound for a strange microgenre of Dutch-produced, Mexican-themed jock jams – including Latin Party’s “Quisiera Tequila” and Interstate 69’s “Tequila.”

The giggle got its greatest and most ridiculous exposure in 1996, however, when two guys from Miami known as the Bayside Boys remixed Spanish duo Los Del Rio’s novelty dance hit “Macarena,” adding in the laugh and some electronic elements to an English-language version, creating a global mega-hit that sat at the top of the Billboard pop charts for 16 weeks and was the second biggest-selling single of the ’90s. The song celebrates a girl whose boyfriend joins the army, so she cheats on him with two of his friends and dreams of going shopping. Moyet’s laugh could be directed either at that situation or with it, standing in for Magdalena, the song’s carefree protagonist. Or Moyet could be laughing all the way to the bank with her “Macarena” sample-clearance royalties.

At that point, the laugh was so ubiquitous that Nate Patrin, music writer and author of forthcoming book Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, compares it to the Wilhelm Scream, the stock sound effect of a man screaming that had been used in almost 400 films and is so familiar to audiences that it barely registers. “Versatility and simplicity helps” samples remain popular through several decades, Patrin says. “The Moyet laugh may be just memorable enough to be recognizable, but simple enough to not completely hijack the song. With other vocal samples, sometimes they’re just another component of an already popular source for beats. If you’re going to sample Clyde Stubblefield’s drums on a James Brown track, why not sample James Brown shouting while you’re at it?”

Patrin goes on to delineate other types of popular vocal samples. “I like the punchline effect, which started around Buchanan and Goodman’s 1956 single ‘Flying Saucer’ and used lines from popular rock songs to complete a news story. That’s been used to great effect on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, 3 Feet High and Rising by De La Soul, KMD’s Mr. Hood and Slum Village’s ‘I Don’t Know.’ Sometimes it’s just a good way of adding a human voice that doesn’t necessarily need to hold any verbal or linguistic meaning, like the ‘Hey!’ from Art of Noise’s ‘Close (To The Edit)’ that’s also shown up everywhere. And in some ways, vocal samples are more recognizably referential than instrumental samples (which were traditionally often kept obscure), so even if a listener might not immediately register the reference points of a previously unheard song, they might recognize a spoken phrase dropped in from a movie or TV show. Samples can even provide some weird world-building, which MF Doom and Madlib are pretty fond of – the latter pretty much integrated the spoken-word records of Melvin van Peebles into his Quasimoto records to carry on that same specific vibe in his own way.”

Moyet’s laugh may have traveled a million dancefloor miles over 36 years. Most recently, it was sampled in BrAque’s 2015 moody techno collage “Dîners en Ville” and has been heard to float over sets from the likes of Black Madonna, Booka Shade and Honey Dijon, but Moyet still owns it. During the performance of “Situation” during Yazoo’s 2008 reunion tour, she leans fully into it, sounding indeed a bit like Price in “Thriller,” but also like a cosmic Mama Bear, welcoming the ecstatic audience to the party. “Somebody had better move out and move on,” is the implication, “Because we’re not going anywhere.”