The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture, visually (e.g., hip hop vocabulary, pocket sizes, comedy structure, and job automation).
Let’s talk about the emotional range of celebs in GIFs.
choose one
Lately at work, I’m communicating what I feel with Michael Jordan GIFs.
It works well when a feeling has nuance and tone, such as "disgusted." Sometimes, the GIF is more expressive than words (“that disgusts me”) or emoji (😡🤢).
There's pretty much a Michael Jordan GIF for every emotion. It’s easy to see that in the chart below, depicting 24 Michael Jordan emotions, ranked by number of searches on Google's GIF Keyboard.
Most of these reflect quintessential Michael Jordan moments, now eternally preserved in GIF form. These culturally significant events are modern idioms—reference points to express how we feel.
“Calm” is the 12th most-searched emotion for Michael Jordan, likely due to the iconic fire drill scene.
“Anger” is the 10th most-searched emotion for Michael Jordan, likely based off of the “flaming Elmo” meme.
“Alone” is the most-searched emotion for Michael Jordan, likely based off of the “Leave Britney Alone” meme.
“Cry” is the 2nd most-searched emotion for Michael Jordan, likely based off of the widely popular “Crying Jordan” meme.
laugh is also in the #1 position. Here's another way to see that, depicted below as a percentage of all emotion searches, with Drake as a reference point.
About 1 in 3 searches are for “laugh,” his top emotion. “laugh” is a pretty common search generally, regardless of celebrity. Some celebrities’ top emotions are more unique, like “clapping” for Drake.
About 1 in 3 searches are for “laugh,” his top emotion. Here are other top emotions for celebrities.
Michael Jordan also ranks highly for other emotions. About 1.3% of Michael Jordan GIF searches are for “hurt,” the 2nd highest for any celebrity in the dataset.
Read the GIF stats for a different celebrity. 👇👇👇
Charlie Smart contributed to data analysis and development of this project.