Here's the story behind Jonah Hill's memorable War Dogs laugh. While he's made a switch towards more dramatic material in recent years, director Todd Phillips is well known for his studio comedies, including Road Trip, School For Scoundrels and 2003's Old School. He scored a major success with 2009's The Hangover, which helped make stars out of both Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis and led to two sequels. The third movie in the trilogy took a less comic tone and felt closer to a thriller than a straight-ahead comedy.
This was something of a sign Todd Phillips wanted to move beyond the genre and his next effort was 2016's War Dogs. This real-life thriller starred Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz, two arms dealers who through a wild series of events score a major deal with the U.S. Army before it all goes awry. The movie was based on a Rolling Stone article and while some elements were invented for the film, the story is - broadly speaking - true to life. War Dogs wasn't much of a hit upon release but Hill, in particular, received praise for his turn as Diveroli.
The real Efraim Diveroli is described as a larger than life character, which is something Jonah Hill heard constantly about him while researching War Dogs. One element every review of the film touched upon was Hill's strange but infectious laugh. Hill later explained in an NPR interview promoting the film how the laugh came to be.
Hill revealed that when thinking about portraying Efraim he realized that the most charismatic people he'd met all had very memorable laughs. He decided to make this a trait in War Dogs, which is used in the story to put other characters at ease. This was something of a last-minute addition, with Todd Phillips stating Hill approached him about the laugh only a few days before the start of filming, but it soon became a key part of the character.
It turned out to be an inspired touch on Hill's part, with Efraim's odd laughter resulting in some of the funniest moments in War Dogs. While the film only performed modestly, Phillips continued moving towards darker material with his gritty take on Joker. Joaquin Pheonix later won a Best Actor Academy Award for his titular performance, and the 2019 movie famously became the first R-rated film to earn over $1 billion worldwide. While there's talk of a sequel to the movie, nothing has been confirmed as yet.