characters to give out the advice that comprises the caption text.

The origins are traced to a forum

thread “Guide to Kissing” on The Mushroom Kingdom, a fan-site dedicated to the video game series
Mario. On September 7, 2006, as a follow-up to his advice of “Just do it, man.” that was posted on
September 4, the user TEM posted a picture of his dog’s face with a color-wheel as a background.
This photo soon generated captioned versions doling out advice, and the meme became known as
Advice Dog (see figure 3). On March 18, 2009, the website Memegenerator.com was launched, which
allowed anyone with access to the site the ability to custom-create image macros. Advice Dog memes
started to be produced en-masse, and this then spawned a broader category of meme, Advice Animals.
These memes peaked in the year 2010, although still continue to generate interest from internet
users.143

Figure 3: Example of an Advice Dog image macro, the meme which

spawned a larger category of meme, Advice Animals

Perhaps the most prolific and definitive viral internet memes are LOLcats. The origins of
LOLcats have not been satisfactorily determined. They are generally attributed to have come about
around the year 2005 or 2006, possibly through PHP and vBulletin message boards. They started to

143
Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead,” 15–17; Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 127–30; Know Your Meme
Contributors, “Advice Dog,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-
dog; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Advice Animals,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/advice-animals; “Guide to Kissing,” The Mushroom Kingdom, accessed May 9,
2019,
https://themushroomkingdom.net/board/index.php?PHPSESSID=vbnngi2781pjn53bhhdfr5jrq4&topic=9725.0;all.
36
become popular on the message board site 4chan, particularly through weekly Caturday posts. On
June 14, 2006, the domain name LOLcats.com was registered.144
However, a competing narrative argues that the cat memes which spawned LOLcats arose
slightly earlier, in 2003. In that year, a photo of a British shorthair cat, later known as Happy Cat due
to its supposedly happy expression, was used by a Russian cat food company. According to the
website Encyclopedia Dramatica and Oh Internet, which dedicate themselves to internet culture, this
photo was then shared in the same year on the Something Awful forums by a user known as FancyCat.
However, at the time of this writing, the researchers at Know Your Meme have not been able to
determine the accuracy of this claim. The earliest documented appearance of the cat on Something
Awful is dated to May 12, 2004, in an article by Reid “Frolixo” Paskiewicz.145
The photo of Happy Cat went viral after the blogger Eric Nakagawa, on January 11, 2007,
made a LOLcat of the image with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (see figure 4) and posted it
on a website, whose title quoted the LOLcat caption, that he and his girlfriend, Kari Unebasami, had
created. Each month, traffic to the I Can Has Cheezburger website doubled until it hit a peak in May
2007 with 1.5 million views a day. Nakagawa allowed users to view galleries of LOLcat images,
submit their own, and vote on their favorites. Subsequent Nakagawa’s creation of the site, the interest
in and popularity of LOLcats surged. On July 12, 2007, Time published an article on popularity of
the LOLcats, Business Week followed suit with a similar article a day later, and The Wall Street
Journal published an article on the subject on August 25, 2007. At that point, Nakagawa had quit his
previous job to manage the website full time, earning income through ad revenue. His site was then
generating some 500,000 views a day and receiving 500 daily LOLcat submissions. Nakagawa then
sold the website to Ben Huh, who built it into the multi-million-dollar media company Cheezburger
Network, later Cheezburger, Inc. Cheezburger then acquired other internet properties including FAIL
blog, Know Your Meme, and Memebase. In 2016, the company was sold to an undisclosed buyer,
who was subsequently announced to be Jacob Nizri, who incorporated the property into his newly
formed company Literally Media.146

144
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats”; Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead,” 16–17.
145
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Happy Cat,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/happy-cat; Reid “Frolixo” Paskiewicz, “The Grocery Gauntlet,” Blog post,
Something Awful, May 12, 2004, http://www.somethingawful.com/news/the-grocery-gauntlet/.
146
Know Your Meme Contributors, “LOLcats”; Know Your Meme Contributors, “Happy Cat”; Know Your Meme
Contributors, “Cheezburger,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cheezburger; John Tozzi, “Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks,” Business Week,
February 15, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20080215230339/http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb20070713_20
2390.htm; Rutkoff, “With ‘LOLcats’ Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke”; Lev Grossman, “Creating a Cute
Cat Frenzy,” Time, July 12, 2007, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1642897,00.html; Börzsei,
“Makes a Meme Instead,” 17; Kathleen Davis, “20 Questions With Ben Huh, Founder of Cheezburger,” Entrepreneur,
August 20, 2013, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227945; Brad McCarty, “Ben Huh Talks Entrepreneurship and
37
 Figure 4: The most iconic LOLcat, "I Can Has
Cheezburger?"

The LOLcat phenomenon then spawned a second, more specific meme: Grumpy Cat. On
September 22, 2012, Bryan Bundesen, user name Cataliades, uploaded a photo of a picture of his
sister Tabatha Bundesen’s snowshoe cat, named Tardar Sauce, to Imgur and shared the photo on
Reddit. Due to feline dwarfism, the cat seemed to have a permanently grumpy expression. On the
Imgur, it received over 1 million views in 48 hours. On Reddit, users soon started to created edit
versions of the photo. Two more photos were uploaded the next day, and three video clips uploaded
to YouTube. On September 23, 2012, the Reddit user tjpainge (account now deleted) uploaded an
image macro of the cat, with the caption reading “I had fun once. It was awful” (see figure 5). From
there, Grumpy Cat rapidly became a LOLcat and internet celebrity. Unlike other internet memes
which might be confined strictly to the virtual world, the Grumpy Cat meme crossed over into the
actual. Her likeness is featured in art projects, a film, books, product endorsements, and various
merchandise (for instance, the Grumpy Cat sticker I saw on a lamppost in Cottbus). At the cat’s first

5 Minutes of Happiness,” The Next Web, May 13, 2011, https://thenextweb.com/media/2011/05/13/cheezburgers-ben-

huh-on-education-entrepreneurship-and-5-minutes-of-happiness/; Todd Bishop, “Cheezburger Joins Forces with Online
Comedy Rival EBaum’s World in Acquisition by Israeli Media Firm,” GeekWire, April 21, 2016,
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/cheezburger-joins-forces-with-comedy-rival-ebaums-world-in-acquisition-by-israeli-
company/; John Cook, “Cheezburger Online Comedy Sites Sold to Unnamed Buyer in Acquisition of Startup That
Made Funny Cat Pictures Famous,” GeekWire, February 22, 2016, https://www.geekwire.com/2016/internet-cat-
picture-site-cheezburger-sold-to/; Brier Dudley, “Cheezburger’s First Venture Financing Raises $30 Million,” The
Seattle Times, January 18, 2011, http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2013971233_brier19.html.
38
public appearance, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in 2013, visitors came from
as far as Australia to catch a glimpse of the famous Grumpy Cat.147 On March 14, 2019, Tardar Sauce
died at age 7 from complications from a urinary tract infection. News of her death made international
headlines.148

Figure 5: The first documented LOLcat of

Grumpy Cat

Another meme which originated in the mid-2000s is Rickrolling. The meme is a practical joke
and consists of a bait-and-switch, typically manifested as a disguised weblink which directs the user
to Rick Astley performing his 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Other variants that I have
personally witnessed include attempts to trick the user into reading the title of the song, or even, in
an example of an internet meme transcending the virtual world into the actual, playing a song through
speakers and then switching the playback to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The origins of this meme
are as a development off of a previous bait-and-switch meme on the 4chan message boards. The
earlier meme was known as a “duckroll,” and consisted of an external link with a sensational title but
that in actuality directs the user to an image of a duck with rollers. Around May 2007, a user on /v/,

147
Know Your Meme Contributors, “Grumpy Cat,” Know Your Meme, accessed May 9, 2019,
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/grumpy-cat; Cataliades, “Meet Grumpy Cat,” Reddit, September 22, 2012,
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/10bu17/meet_grumpy_cat/; Lisa Kocay, “Meet the Most Influential Pets:
Grumpy Cat, Doug the Pug and More,” Forbes, July 31, 2017,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakocay/2017/07/31/meet-the-most-influential-pets-grumpy-cat-doug-the-pug-and-
more/; Brandon Griggs, “The Unlikely Star of SXSW: Grumpy Cat,” CNN, March 11, 2013,
https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/10/tech/web/grumpy-cat-sxsw/index.html; Alyson Shontell, “This 29-Year-Old Was A
Waitress — Then She Got A Cat With Dwarfism, Quit Her Job, And Became A Multi-Millionaire,” Business Insider,
December 8, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-grumpy-cats-owner-tabetha-bundesen-2014-12.
148
Angela Watercutter, “Grumpy Cat’s Death Marks the End of the Joyful Internet,” Wired, May 17, 2019,
https://www.wired.com/story/grumpy-cat-obit/; “Internet Legend Grumpy Cat Dies,” May 17, 2019, sec. US & Canada,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48308638; Daniel Victor, “Grumpy Cat, Internet Celebrity With a
Piercing Look of Contempt, Is Dead at 7,” The New York Times, May 20, 2019, sec. Business,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/business/media/grumpy-cat-dead.html.
39