Famous Cat Memes and Where They Came From

The memes, oldest first

Keyboard Cat (1984, viral 2009)

A cat called Fatso, wearing a blue baby T-shirt, “plays” an electric keyboard. Charlie Schmidt filmed it in 1984 and put it on YouTube in June 2007. It became a meme in February 2009, when Brad O’Farrell added the clip to the end of a blooper video to “play off” the person who fell, like a vaudeville act getting the hook. Hundreds of “Play him off, Keyboard Cat” videos followed (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme).

Longcat (mid-2000s)

Shiro, a white cat from Japan, was photographed being held up by the front legs, stretched out to look impossibly long. The picture spread on the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel around 2005 or 2006, then on English-language forums, where people stretched her to absurd lengths. Shiro had been rescued from the street in 2002 and died on 20 September 2020, aged 18 (Wikipedia).

Ceiling Cat (mid-2000s)

A cat peers down through a hole in a ceiling. The caption template “Ceiling Cat is watching you…” turned it into a running joke, and fans later gave it a rival, Basement Cat, a black cat who lives downstairs. The pair became the good and evil of the lolcat universe (Know Your Meme).

Lolcats and “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (2007)

Captioned cat photos in broken, cheerful English were already called lolcats by 2006. On 11 January 2007 Eric Nakagawa posted a picture of a smiling cat known as Happycat, with the caption “I can has cheezburger?”. He and Kari Unebasami built a website around it the same month, and by May 2007 it was getting up to 1.5 million hits a day (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme).

The idea is older than the web. Wikipedia notes the British photographer Harry Pointer selling cat photos with funny captions in the 1870s (Wikipedia).

Nyan Cat (2011)

A pixel cat with a Pop-Tart body flies through space, trailing a rainbow. Christopher Torres drew the animation on 2 April 2011, based on his own cat, Marty. Three days later a YouTube user set it to a Japanese pop song, and the loop went viral (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme).

Grumpy Cat (2012)

Her real name was Tardar Sauce, and her permanent frown came from an underbite and feline dwarfism, not her mood. On 22 September 2012 her owner’s brother posted her photo on Reddit. Redditors turned it into lolcats and parodies, and by March 2013 she was on morning television as the internet’s symbol of not being impressed. She died on 14 May 2019, aged 7 (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme).

Woman Yelling at a Cat (2019)

Two unrelated pictures made one meme. On the left: Taylor Armstrong crying and pointing in a 2011 episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. On the right: Smudge, a white cat from Ottawa, sitting at a dinner table behind a plate of salad, posted on Tumblr by his owner in June 2018 with the caption “He no like vegetals”. A Twitter user put them side by side on 1 May 2019, and by June the pairing was everywhere (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme).

Why cats rule the internet

This part is opinion, not science. Cats are funny because they do not perform for us. A dog will look at the camera; a cat will knock your glass off the table while holding eye contact.

Cats also have faces that read like human moods. Grumpy Cat looked like Monday morning. Smudge looked like every person who has ever been shouted at over something that was not their fault. A caption only has to name the mood.

And memes need a blank stare to project onto. A cat gives you one for free.

Make your own cat meme moment

Every meme above began with somebody’s own cat doing something ridiculous at home. Bad Cat Daily is built on that idea: snap your own cat, and it becomes the chaos in today’s room. Cats are chaos; now yours gets to prove it.

It is a daily game that runs in the browser: snap your cat, then wreck today’s room.

If you want the longer story of how that works, read how to put your cat in a game.

Prefer something cosier? The main Token Tails game at /game lets you meet your cat and play, with no sign-up needed.

Real cats behind the screen

Every famous meme cat had a home. Many cats never get one. Token Tails games are tied to Pink Paw (Rožinė pėdutė), a cat shelter in Kaunas, Lithuania, and you can see every payout to it on the shelter payouts page.

For a longer look at how cats went from temple guardians to internet stars, read cats in history.