About

Business Cat is an advice animal image macro series featuring a cat in a tie in front of a starburst background. The overlaid text usually includes something an office boss would do or request, but with a feline twist.

Origin

On January 1st, 2011, Something Awful forum user Apple Jax posted a picture of her boyfriend Daniel Vecchitto's cat Emilio^[1] in a thread titled "PYF Cat Pictures (it rises again). When the photo was taken, Emilio the cat was wearing a tie he had received for Christmas from Etsy shop Whisker Kisses.^[6]

Three days later, the photo was reposted to Reddit^[3] with the title "Business Cat." Several hours later, the image was put on MemeGenerator^[5] and a second Reddit thread^[4] entitled "Business Cat ain't no joke" marked the first appearance of the image macro, captioned "No LOL here, Get your ass in my office."

Spread

I Can Has Cheezburger^[9] featured a Business Cat on January 26th, 2011. A series of instances was posted to Urlesque^[8] on February 15th, 2011. It was also featured on Buzzfeed^[11], Uproxx^[12] and Smosh^[13] between January and March. In response to the macro, Daniel purchased the domain yobusinesscat.com^[2] on March 7th, 2011. The Quickmeme^[7] page for Business Cat has over 6000 submissions as of December 2011. In June 2011, the single topic blog Fuck Yeah Business Cat^[14] was created but not continued past that month.

Notable Derivatives

Template

Search Interest

Though there was some search traffic for Business Cat in February 2010, this is tied to a Japanese YouTube video^[10] about a similarly dressed feline. Search jumped up in February 2011, a month after the original image was posted.

External References