About

Boozecats is a photoshop meme that involves censoring alcoholic beverages in a photo by superimposing images of cats over the bottles or cups. Many of these are curated on the single topic blog of the same name.

Origin

In July 2009, Brooklyn resident Ryan Darrenkamp created the first boozecats image after his roommate Lisa was searching for a photo of herself with a friend that was about to get married for a photo album. All of the photos, however, contained beer, so Darrenkamp photoshopped cats over each of the bottles and cups in a photo of a party^[1] they both attended. On July 13th, he uploaded six different boozecat photos to a Facebook album^[2] to share with his friends.

Spread

That day, Darrenkamp purchased the domain name Boozecats.com^[3] but did not share the photos on the site until October 27th, 2009. The next month, Entertainment Weekly^[6], Buzzfeed^[7] Urlesque^[4], and beer-focused blog 40cozy^[8] published articles about the blog with pop culture news wire Flash News^[5] picking up on it that December. That month, Darrenkamp also created a Twitter account^[9], but did not keep it active.

In July 2010, Darrenkamp uploaded a video titled "The Big Lemeowski,"^[10] replacing the beers in a scene from 1998 comedy film The Big Lebowski with cats. That month, he was also interviewed by LA Weekly^[11] on the history of the blog. In August 2011, humor site Sad and Useless^[13] and image hosting site EatLiver^[14] posted compilations of boozecat photos titled "How to Properly Hide Booze in Your Facebook Pictures." The photos were reposted on Tumblr^[12] on November 15th, receiving over 17,000 notes. After this, MTV^[18] as well as pop culture blogs Trend Hunter^[15], Uproxx^[16] and The Chive^[17] all shared compilations of these photos.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search for boozecats peaked in December 2009 and then dropped off completely until August 2011. In 2012, it has been on the decline.

External References