About

Thumbs Up Cat refers to a series of photoshopped images of cats giving a thumbs up, The most common one used in memes is a photoshopped version of a crying cat that went viral in 2017, but other memes about the thumbs up can be tracked to 2011 with a viral video of a black cat doing the sign with its paw. The meme also sparked versions in which the cat paws are replaced with a human hand doing the thumbs up sign.

Origin

On February 23rd, 2011, YouTube^[1] user @tfg69 posted the video of a black cat lying down on the couch while its owner was asking for a "thumbs up" sign, which the cat follows by pressing its paw turning into a thumbs up (shown below). The post, titled "Amazing Cat Gives Thumbs Up" amassed over 3.3 million views and 17,000 likes in 13 years.

Spread

While there are many memes featuring cats doing the thumbs up sign, Thumbs Up Sad Cat was one of the most viral iterations of the trend, becoming a notable meme on June 17th, 2019, after Redditor IAMAdumbgirl posted the original photoshopped image captioned "sad thumbs up" to r/sadcats^[2] (shown below). The post received over 1,700 points (99% upvoted) in a year.

On October 9th, 2022, TikTok^[3] user @gisnbolo posted a version of the meme replacing a cat's paw for a human hand doing the thumbs up sign (shown below, left), which garnered over 452,000 plays and 90,000 likes in two years. On August 13th, 2023, an edit featuring the same cat was posted on TikTok^[4] by @itsowennn0, which amassed roughly 9,000 plays and 99 likes in a year.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References