Why I Love The Internets: LOLcats
When I was in college, I lived in a house with about thirty men. [And, no, there were no circle jerks or other such things one always hears about frat life. I was darn disappointed by that--so much so that I had to move to San Francisco only to learn that we only have hot mansex in the streets like two or three days a year. And it's only a couple of streets even then. Freakin' myths.] One thing we did for amusement occasionally was to take a photo and stick it to a piece of paper, then smack that up on one of the bathroom stalls with a pen on a string. People would write heeeelarious captions.
Well, that was the stone age. The internets have essentially made that stall wall available to everyone. You can take a photo, smack it on a page with a caption, and flush it through the "series of tubes" that is the Internet, and soon the whole world can giggle about the juxtaposition of a funny photo with a few words.
Which brings me to the LOLcats phenomenon. I only learned of it recently, though I gather it's been around since 2006. (As is true of most of what I know, I learned this from wikipedia.) Take a cat photo, attribute a quote to the cat, giggle, and share:
photo: Blair Decker via icanhascheezeburger.com
Anthropomorphism is not new, certainly. But for some reason, this particular meme really nails it. And I'm interested in why this is so. I have had cats in the past, so I'm familiar with that hunch one has that the cat knows more than humans can fathom. The biggest earthquake I've felt in San Francisco freaked my cats out a full thirty seconds before the earth moved perceptibly to me. After nine-eleven, when I was totally freaked out for about a month that the Bush regime was getting ready to screw up the world and besmirch the glory of my beloved country, those cats just sensed that I needed them, and they provided me with oodles and gobs of comfort. And I have a dear friend who hates cats, which I've always believed has something to do with the fact that he's a superior intellect made a bit uncomfortable by that vast unknown connection they seem to have with the oversoul.
For me, the inherent humor in LOLcats is the strange spelling and syntax. It's sort of the opposite of taking a photo of George W. Bush and superimposing the word "genius" over it. Like, right, yeah, these cute little critters who are psychic can't spell.
Well, that was the stone age. The internets have essentially made that stall wall available to everyone. You can take a photo, smack it on a page with a caption, and flush it through the "series of tubes" that is the Internet, and soon the whole world can giggle about the juxtaposition of a funny photo with a few words.
Which brings me to the LOLcats phenomenon. I only learned of it recently, though I gather it's been around since 2006. (As is true of most of what I know, I learned this from wikipedia.) Take a cat photo, attribute a quote to the cat, giggle, and share:
photo: Blair Decker via icanhascheezeburger.com
Anthropomorphism is not new, certainly. But for some reason, this particular meme really nails it. And I'm interested in why this is so. I have had cats in the past, so I'm familiar with that hunch one has that the cat knows more than humans can fathom. The biggest earthquake I've felt in San Francisco freaked my cats out a full thirty seconds before the earth moved perceptibly to me. After nine-eleven, when I was totally freaked out for about a month that the Bush regime was getting ready to screw up the world and besmirch the glory of my beloved country, those cats just sensed that I needed them, and they provided me with oodles and gobs of comfort. And I have a dear friend who hates cats, which I've always believed has something to do with the fact that he's a superior intellect made a bit uncomfortable by that vast unknown connection they seem to have with the oversoul.
For me, the inherent humor in LOLcats is the strange spelling and syntax. It's sort of the opposite of taking a photo of George W. Bush and superimposing the word "genius" over it. Like, right, yeah, these cute little critters who are psychic can't spell.
Labels: LOLcats
posted by O. Pinionated at
11:20 AM
2 Comments:
Theorists of comedy, from Freud on, have suggested that animating an inanimate object is one of the surest ways to laughter/anxiety. The LOLcats phenomenon follows this axiom while making a more complex point about what now can stand for inanimate: photos of animals. Your idea that there's something unknowable about their knowledge brings this complex point into relief.
Miriam, will you marry me?
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