The Last Laugh (Cry)

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Ok then. Gen Z has deemed the laughing-crying emoji uncool, yaniki cancelled. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

It was only 2015, the Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year was not a word but this same emoji, official name, "Face with Tears of Joy". Even then, there were dissenters. The Daily Edge wrote "look at its stupid head" declaring "nothing is so funny". In 2016, Abi Wilkinson wrote in The Guardian, the graphic was intrinsically obnoxious, reminding her of smug elites who gloat at human suffering. It is a favourite of trolls who plonk it under every serious post, to trivialise it like bullying schoolboys. Nevertheless, that emoji has topped the charts all through till 2020.

And then, death by un-coolness. "I saw older people using it, like moms, older siblings, and generally older people, so I stopped using it," a 21-year-old man told CNN Business. Yaniki, young people don't want to use it, because older people use it so much. It is seen as exaggerated and insincere - the provenance of older people.

I get that. For instance, I would like to outlaw what I call the sarcastic namaste emoji, because it reminds me of all the oldies from my youth joining their hands with "baksh do aur padhai kar lo" and movie characters' "shukriya Ramesh babu, for insulting me", as also the extra devotional face of Gulshan Kumar in mata ne bulaya hai music videos. My feeling too was, nothing is that serious, ok. Even now, when someone responds to a compliment with that insincere namaste, I yearn for a Manorama or Lalita Pawar emoji to communicate "bade aaye namaste emoji behjne wale" but they don't exist
(how ridiculous!).

If you are looking here and there to avoid being identified as an oldie, relax. Once, inter-generational meant people with grey hair versus people with non-grey hair. Now, it's far more, um, nuanced. With this emoji, it's Gen Zs telling millennials they aren't cool - or young - anymore. If you are a middle-aged survivor of millennials support group member, I know that you are right now sending a dozen laughing-crying emojis in your heart while saying ‘what goes around comes around'. If you are a millennial, you may be trying to come up with a meme that is simultaneously sincere and ironic.

The laughing-crying emoji may indeed have been best suited to the millennials era, where ironic self-awareness was used to offset a sometimes theoretical political engagement, primarily carried out online, as in, "I know it's problematic, but I can't help posting another selfie". "I know I'm privileged, but I am woke." Laughing and crying. Post pandemic, perhaps, this is not culturally tenable. By the way, the new emoji to indicate amusement is the rather recessive skull - visual equivalent of Gen Z slang, "I'm dead". This, oddly, reminds me of an even older generation of Americans - those (like any character in Friends) who would say "that's hilarious" instead of actually laughing, leaving you perplexed and suspicious about their amusement.

Inter-generational power struggles play out cultural patricide, declaring those in power irrelevant through un-coolness, to supplant them. As statues are brought down periodically, so cool and fashion are declared meaningless and stripped of all symbolic and material value. But only to be rediscovered some time later, reclaimed, refurbished and resold, laughing-crying all the way to the bank.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com