LOLcats in this internet age are ubiquitous across the internet. Even in DailyKos our very own DemocraticOz is well-known for his frequent postings of Ceiling Cat starting with this one:
and continuing this tradition until today. LOLcats make frequent appearances in Cheers and Jeers and we have made our own LOLcandidates among other types of LOL-things.
So, where did this wonderful and self-replicating idea actually come from?
As they say, lets go over the fold.
What is a lolcat?
A lolcat is an internet meme that superimposes text—usually sans serif such as Impact—over a image of a cat, doing something. The text is usually interpreted as if the cat itself was saying it, usually in a form of English known as lol-speek, aol-speak, or Internets Engrish, all of which is closely related to the slang-style of internet talk (using u for you and brb for be right back, etc.) which in turn is closely related to baby-talk.
A meme as defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene is "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation...Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
Essentially, a meme is a large-scale inside joke, for example a DailyKos meme might be the word "Libercrat" to refer to Democrats who act like Liberman.
LOLcats themselves bring two of humanities time-honored traditions into focus: the love of cats and the love of captioning. The forerunners to the LOLcats of today are the masturbation kitten posted on the humor website Fark in 2002 and Ceiling Cat, who surfaced on the internet sometime in 2003, featured below:
Masturbation Kitten:
Ceiling Cat:
They originated from the 'Caturday' of the imageboard 4chan. The tradition of Caturday goes back as late as 2004 or 2005 where the weekend ritual was to post funny pictures of your cat. One day in 2005 someone started off a Caturday thread with this image:
One image that changed the course of the internet.
Suddenly in that thread there followed dozens of other copycat images, the idea spreading like wildfire. Eric Nakagawa posted the image at a website he had created: www.icanhascheezburger.com as just an inside joke for him and his friends. "We just thought, O.K., they're funny,"Nakagawa says. "Suddenly we started getting hits. I was like, where are these coming from?"(Source)eventually, he decided to make it into a blog, so visitors to the site could write comments and even add their own images, and the hits skyrocketed to 500,000-600,000 in a day.
Outwards from these humor cesspools of the internet, LOLcat has continued to grow, in popularity and diversity, branching off into groups including loldogs and even lolcandidates:
We look forward to an increasingly diverse world of lolcats and lolhumor.