Watch: Rare Moment Shows Buckingham Palace Visitor Making A Royal Guard Laugh

The King’s Guards and members of the Household Cavalry are known for staying up straight without any expression as they take their positions outside royal residences. They are not “allowed” to laugh, smile or even wince. Often people are seen trying to provoke the guards to act by making jokes, dancing in front of them, or in some cases invading their personal space and touching their uniforms. In many cases, people fail to elicit any reactions from guards, except when they touch the guards or their horses.

Now an undated video has resurfaced online that shows a royal soldier, who appears to be a member of the Household Cavalry regiment, breaking into a laugh. The guard lets his guard down in response to a man who claims to have known him in school.

The man stands next to the straight-faced guard and says, “I know him, he was never talkative. I remember him from school. He used to sit by himself and read books. I was just this guy fooling around and having fun. If you ask him questions he would answer them with his head.” He added, “His mother always picked him up from school, you know he was that type of guy that until he was 20 his mother picked him from school.” At the end of the last sentence, the guard breaks into a laugh.

This video was recently posted on X where it got over 18 million views since it was shared on June 19. An X user wrote, “You know when someone is going to laugh when you look at them and you have an idea of how they’re going to be, and they turn out exactly as you thought they’d be.”

Another person wrote, “I have never seen one of these guys break character, shouldn’t the guy be knighted for such a groundbreaking act?”

An X user predicted a dystopian future and wrote, “One day royalty will have robots that will replace the royal guards and sadly we will not be able to make these royal robots laugh.”

Someone suggested, “I would like to see famous stand-up comedians do material next to Royal Guards to see which one of them could get them to laugh.”

Royal Guards have to maintain the protocol in biting cold and even during heatwaves. In recent years there has been much debate about removing the guards from public places, making their working hours shorter, and giving them more suitable uniforms for summer.