Lolcats: From Victorian Cat Photos to I Can Has Cheezburger

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In the early 1870s, British portrait photographer Harry Pointer posed his cats roller skating and sitting at tiny tea tables, then printed joke captions beneath them on souvenir cards people traded in their parlors. This episode argues that his Brighton Cats series holds the full DNA of the internet meme, and follows the idea across 150 years to the lolcat: a cat photo stamped with blocky white text in a deliberately broken dialect. The format is sillier than it looks and more rule-bound than anyone expected.

Linguists who assumed lolspeak was baby talk found consistent grammar instead, with regularized verbs, phonetic spelling, and fixed templates such as the cat in your fridge eating your food. The episode traces the form from Caturday threads on the anonymous image board 4chan to the January 2007 launch of I Can Has Cheezburger, and then to its strangest offspring: a crowdsourced Bible translation, a working programming language, and a taxidermy sculpture in a major museum.

• Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter built dioramas of stuffed kittens attending a wedding, part of a craze for animals staged in human scenes.
• After Time journalist Lev Grossman dated the earliest lolcat to 2006, readers pushed him to correct it to 2005. Caturday.com was registered on April 30, 2005.
• The American Dialect Society named lolcat a runner-up for 2007 Word of the Year. It lost to Googleganger.
• Fans built a mythology around Ceiling Cat as a watching god and Basement Cat as his dark rival, then cast them as God and Satan in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project.
• LOLCODE is a functioning esoteric programming language with commands like I HAS A and KTHXBYE, and a 2016 taxidermy sculpture of Ceiling Cat now sits in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.