Popular Culture Thinks Cats Are Funny Felines
Many people seem to think that cats are funny. As cats are one of the most popular pets in the world, there are a large number of materials about cats and humor in all forms of media ranging from cat joke books to home made cat videos. The huge interest in cats has even sparked a huge internet culture surrounding cat humor.
The amusement often stems from seeing a cat carry out everyday human activities with comical results. An example is the mundane act of looking into a mirror. When a cat looks into a mirror, a common reaction is to approach the mirror cautiously, and then back away suddenly in fear as their own reflection in the mirror moves. In this case, curiosity does not kill the cat, but instead brings about laughter from their human counterparts. When caught on video, the joke is shared with viewers from all over the world.
Besides funny videoes, digitally edited images of cats can be found anywhere on the world wide web. These cats are shown either carrying out an everyday human activity or holding some form of modern equipment. Photos usually depict this domestic pet caught in bizarre poses and captions are then edited onto the image. These type of humorous images are called “lolcat”. In many online forums and chat sites, a special version of English known as internet slang is often used. “lol” is one such abbreviation of the English “laugh out loud” which is usually used to show amusement at something.
A still of a cat doing a regular activity such a stretching on its hind legs could be changed into an image of a rock and roll kitty. This can be done by captioning the image with references to rock and roll. Even with photos where the cat is just sitting, adding a hilarious caption would change the nature of the picture. These forms the basis for lolcat.
The language of the captions plays a part in creating the humor. Ungrammatical, misspelled English parodied off internet slang is often the language of choice. This language has been termed “lolspeak” or “kitty pidgin”. A guide on how to use kitty pidgin has even been written on the internet.
The rules of lolspeak is highly dependent on grammatical errors. This would include inaccurate usage of the verb “to be”, or using the wrong tenses in a sentence. Words could be rearranged so that regular English sentence structure is ignored.
Spelling errors are a good thing in lolspeak. Similar sounding consonants can be substituted for one another and the English definite article “the” should be misspelled as “teh”. Emotions can be shown through text by using a disproportionate amount of exclamation marks or using a long list of internet slang short forms to form a single word.
While funny cat video has always been a staple in game shows featuring home videos, lolcat has gone so far as to catch attention from the news and entertainment media. This cultural phenomena has even caught on with other popular domestic animals such as dogs and rabbits, forming “loldogs”, “lolrabbits” and so on. The bible has been translated into kitty pidgin as a parody and a comic book based off lolcat was published in 2008. With so much focus on cat humor, cats must be really funny!
