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By Martha McHardy
US News Reporter
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A clip showing Vice President Kamala Harris recounting where her laugh comes from has resurfaced online.
Harris, who is the favorite to become the Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden announced he was not running for reelection, has often faced criticism for her loud and full-bodied laugh.
Harris faced mockery for her laugh at a rally in Michigan on Saturday when former President Donald Trump told the crowd: "I call her laughing Kamala. Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts. "
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In the clip from The Drew Barrymore Show, which dates from late April, Harris tells the host: "Let me just tell you something: I have my mother's laugh.
"And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen, drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs."
The clip has garnered over 6 million views on X, formerly Twitter.
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On Tuesday, Harris' husband, Douglas Emhoff, responded to Trump's criticism of his wife's laugh.
"That's all he's got?" he said, according to The Daily Beast.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns via email.
Another video, posted by right-wing account Libs of TikTok, showed a compilation of clips of Harris laughing with the text: "They want this woman to be President." The video had more than 20 million views.
"The most bizarre Trump/GOP criticism of Kamala Harris is she has a warm, contagious laugh that fills the room. I do not understand it," wrote Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, on Monday.
The criticism of the vice president's laugh even reached Australia where far-right commentator Teena McQueen said in 2023: "The woman continually laughs this ridiculous laugh. I don't know what drugs she's on, or what makes her so happy all the time, but she's an absolute disgrace and she hasn't done women any favors."
Female laughter has been something of a politicized issue, with its occurrence in public sometimes being associated with a lack of social modesty or hysteria.
Under Taliban rule in 2001, female laughter was banned in Afghanistan, with then first lady Laura Bush noting in a speech that same year that women faced beatings if they were seen laughing.
In a speech in 2014, then Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç said women should not laugh in out loud. "A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent," Arinç said in a speech. "She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times."
Turkish women responded by posting pictures of themselves defiantly laughing on social media, with the hashtags #direnkahkaha (resist laughter) and #direnkadin (resist woman).
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