The Cat Gets a Line
Brighton Cats to Ceiling Cat
Since the early 1870s people have handed cats a caption. Here is what published research says the clips do for the person watching.
The cat on the card is posed, and somebody has given it a line. In the early 1870s the British portrait photographer Harry Pointer made a carte de visite series of cats set up in various situations. To most of the cards he added amusing text. The cards were known as Brighton Cats.
That is the oldest trick in the cat business. A cat cannot tell you what it thinks, so people have been telling you for it since the 1870s, through a caption, a speech balloon, a verdict from the ceiling. The habit moved from the studio card to the screen, and published research has since asked what the clips do for the person watching. It has not settled why that person sees a character in the first place.
The internet gave the habit a name. The domain lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006, and the word lolcat was in use by that month. The format is simple. There is a cat photo, a caption that works as a speech balloon carrying the cat's own comment or describing the scene, and spelling that is wrong on purpose. Lolcat language has been likened to baby talk, though it draws on more than that.
Seven months later a cat had a business plan. On January 11, 2007, Eric Nakagawa posted an image from the comedy website Something Awful of a cat known as Happycat, captioned "I can has cheezburger?" That post started I Can Has Cheezburger? By May 2007 the site was drawing up to 1.5 million hits a day. That September a group of investors bought it for US$2 million. CNET put its database at more than 800,000 LOLCats.
Wikipedia credits the site with bringing animal image macros and lolspeak into mainstream use, and with making internet memes profitable. In its early days it ran on reader submissions. By 2017 it relied on a full editorial team instead, which is one way of saying the cats went professional.
The captions also gave cats a moral life. In the Ceiling Cat meme a cat looks down on the viewer, almost in judgment. In lolcat lore, Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat are said to stand for good and evil. The joke eventually reached the museum: a 2016 taxidermy cat installation mimicking the meme is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The numbers on moving cats are large, if old. Internet data cited in a 2015 Indiana University release counted more than 2 million cat videos posted to YouTube in 2014, with almost 26 billion views. In that data, cat videos drew more views per video than any other category of YouTube content.
A survey of the people behind those views came from a researcher who does not own a cat. Jessica Gall Myrick of Indiana University, who owns a pug, surveyed almost 7,000 people about watching cat videos and how it affects their moods. The study appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, and ScienceDaily ran the university's release on June 16, 2015. Her case for taking the subject seriously was plain: "the fact is that it's one of the most popular uses of the Internet today," she said.
What people reported is the useful part. They felt more energetic and more positive after watching cat-related online media than before. The pleasure outweighed any guilt about procrastinating, a finding with a familiar shape for anyone who has watched one more clip instead of answering an email. Cat owners were more likely to watch, and so were people with traits such as agreeableness and shyness. About a quarter of the clips people watched were ones they went looking for. The rest they came across. They knew the stars by name, too: celebrity cats such as Nala Cat and Henri, Le Chat Noir.
By then the clips had stopped being private. The Walker Art Center's first Internet Cat Video Festival drew more than 10,000 YouTube nominations, which jurors cut to a few hundred videos. Writing in October 2012, the Walker's Scott Stulen said the festival turned a solitary online viewing experience into a real-world social event. He added that watching Keyboard Cat with thousands of people laughing at once is a very different thing from watching it alone. Jezebel's Madeline Davies, quoted by the Walker, wrote that it "made an act of isolation (sitting alone in front of your computer screen) into a celebration of togetherness." The festival's Golden Kitty went to Henri 2, Paw De Deux, by Will Braden, which had nearly 6 million views by that October.
That leaves the big question half answered. The survey asked people about their viewing and their moods, so it tells us what people say the clips do for them. Why a viewer looks at a cat and sees a character with opinions is a question it does not settle. Myrick said as much about the field in 2015: "there is really little empirical work done on why so many of us do this, or what effects it might have on us." She suggested future work could look at online cat videos as a form of low-cost pet therapy. Those words are a decade old.
The history suggests one reading, and it is only a reading. Since the 1870s, the personality has usually arrived with the words. Pointer's cats got text, lolcats got a speech balloon, and Ceiling Cat got a verdict. Whether the caption creates the character or only names one the viewer already saw is what research would have to separate.
The cat on Pointer's card still has its line. It never asked for one.
“Whether the caption creates the character or only names one the viewer already saw is what research would have to separate.”
