LOLcats

About

LOLcats are image macros consisting of humorous photos of cats with superimposed text written in a form of broken English known as lolspeak. The LOLcat meme gained much of its traction through the weekly ritual of Caturday on 4chan and I Can Has Cheezburger.

Origin

According to an article in The Star,^[5] LOLcats originated on the imageboard 4chan sometime in 2005, when an anonymous user submitted a picture of a relaxed cat waiting for “Caturday.” In a blog post on Time Magazine’s TechLand,^[7] writer Lev Grossman published an email claiming that Caturday was created in 2005 as a protest to “Furry Friday” threads.

“There is more than enough EXIF data scattered around the internet to prove that cat macros are ancient, by internet standards. Caturday, for example, was a meme on a 4chan.org imageboard which originated around the beginning of 2005 as a protest against \”Furry Friday\” threads (In which basement-dwelling creeps would post anthropomorphic disney characters giving [sorry, gotta go family values at this point.”

Precursors

In the 1870s, photographer Harry Pointer^[3] took black-and-white photographs or cats posed in a variety of different situations, adding humorous text referencing the context of the photo (shown below, left). In the early 20th century Harry Whittier Frees,^[4] an American photographer, produced similar-looking photographs with overlaid text (shown below, right)

In the 1970s, a motivational poster of a cat hanging from a tree branch with the caption “Hang in there, baby” was released (shown below, left), which spawned a series of imitations (shown below, right).

Spread

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The first Urban Dictionary^[6] was submitted by user bridgepiercingbex on September 12th, 2006, which defined the terms as “an added extra to the normal use of ‘lol’.” On June 12th, 2007, Time Magazine^[8] published an article about the LOLcat phenomenon, reporting that a Google search for “lolcat” already yielded over 3.3 million results and that the webiste I Can Has Cheezburger was receiving 200-500 submissions per day. On January 5th, 2008, the /r/lolcats subreddit was created, which garnered over 67,000 subscribers over the next five years. On December 4th, 2009, Entertainment Weekly^[9] ranked LOLcats as #99 in a list of the “100 Greatest Movies, TV Shows and More.” On December 22nd, 2010, the cat enthusiast blog Catster^[12] published a list of the “top 10 most famous LOLcats,” including Happy Cat, Monorail Cat, Limecat, Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat. On May 8th, 2012, The Atlantic^[10] published an article about the academic study of lolcats, reporting on researcher Kate Miltner’s dissertation^[11] on the appeal of LOLcats.

Exhibitions

On November 10th, 2012, The Huffington Post^[2] published an article about an exhibition at the Framer’s Gallery in London titled “LOLCAT – TEH EXHIBISHUN,” featuring 49 original LOLCat inspired artworks. On January 24th, 2013, The Huffington Post^[1] reported that a new version of the exhibition had opened at The Framer’s Gallery.

Search Interest

External References