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Longcat
One photo of a white cat lifted under the front legs, her body stretching impossibly downward, was enough. It surfaced on the Japanese imageboard 2chan around 2004 or 2005, and the caption "Longcat is long" carried it worldwide. Fans then did what internet folklore does best: they built a mythology, complete with a dark nemesis called Tacgnol, out of a single picture.
The real cat was Shiroi, whose name means white, and her owner's announcement of her death in September 2020 drew a wave of tributes. She was about 18. Longcat is the place to start for anyone who wants to see how early meme culture turned a family snapshot into shared lore.
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I Can Has Cheezburger?
Happy Cat, the grinning gray cat of "I can has cheezburger?"
A chubby gray British Shorthair with a hopeful grin, captioned in broken English, gave the world both the lolcat format and the site I Can Has Cheezburger in 2007. That misspelled cat-speak became the house style of cat captions for years and turned meme-making into a daily habit for huge numbers of people.
Nobody can say for sure who the cat was. Reports conflict: one popular account names a British Shorthair called Frank, and the photo is said to have circulated on the Something Awful forums around 2003. That mystery is part of the story, since the image spread far faster than its origin did.
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Keyboard Cat
Fatso, the original Keyboard Cat
The footage is older than the web itself: performance artist Charlie Schmidt filmed his cat Fatso "playing" a keyboard in 1984, moving the paws himself to make it work. He put it on YouTube in 2007 as "Cool Cat," and almost nobody noticed. Then Brad O'Farrell tacked it onto a clip of a man tumbling down an escalator, and "play him off, Keyboard Cat" became the internet's way to end any blunder.
That is the lesson Keyboard Cat teaches best: a meme often takes off when someone else finds a new use for old footage. Schmidt kept the act going with a later cat, Bento, and the tune even ended up in a pistachio commercial in 2010.
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Maru (cat)
Maru had one talent, and it was enough: squeezing himself into cardboard boxes far too small for him, then sliding, diving and wedging his way out again. His owner in Japan simply filmed him growing up, with no gimmick beyond patience and a stack of boxes, and the quiet videos became a global comfort watch.
By September 2016 his videos had passed 325 million views, and Guinness World Records named him the most viewed animal on YouTube. The Scottish Fold died on September 6, 2025, at 18, after a diagnosis of lung cancer. Start here if you want the gentle, slice-of-life side of cat fame rather than the joke format.
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Lil Bub
Lil Bub was the runt of a feral litter, found in a rural Indiana toolshed, and born with a multitude of genetic anomalies. An extreme form of dwarfism left her limbs small, and her teeth never came in, so her tongue always poked out. Her owner, Mike Bridavsky, posted about her on Tumblr, and her wide-eyed face took off from there.
What makes her essential is what that fame paid for. From 2014, Lil BUB's BIG Fund with the ASPCA supported special-needs pets, administering over $400,000 in grants to shelters. She died in her sleep on December 1, 2019, after a persistent bone infection. Her story shows how a cat with real health conditions could be celebrated without being turned into a punchline.
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Henri, le Chat Noir
Henri, the brooding star of Will Braden's films
Henri proved a cat video could be written, not just filmed. Will Braden's short films are a French film noir parody that casts him as a weary existentialist, gloomily enduring the spoiled and mundane life of a house cat, and the joke landed with viewers who were tired of plain cuteness.
The breakthrough came in 2012, when the sequel "Paw de Deux" won the Golden Kitty at the first Internet Cat Video Festival, held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before a crowd of more than 10,000. Watch Henri for the moment cat videos became a genre with authors.
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Grumpy Cat
Her real name was Tardar Sauce, and her permanent scowl came from feline dwarfism and an underbite, not a bad mood. Photos of that face hit Reddit in 2012, and within months she was the default reaction image for every disappointment online.
Grumpy Cat matters because she showed how far a meme could travel offline. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, built a company around her, she appeared in Honey Nut Cheerios commercials, and Lifetime made a 2014 holiday movie, "Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever," with Aubrey Plaza as her voice. She died on May 14, 2019, at age 7, from complications of a urinary tract infection. Her face is still the shorthand for "no."
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Colonel Meow
Colonel Meow turned a cat into a full character with a voice. His owners in Los Angeles adopted the Himalayan-Persian cross from a rescue group and named him for his "epic frown and fur," then posted in his voice as a grand commander who called his millions of fans his "minions." The writing, not just the photos, is what kept people coming back.
The fur was real, too: three vets measured it at about 9 inches, and Guinness World Records listed him as the cat with the longest fur in its 2014 edition. He died in January 2014, still a young cat. Pick him to see the template that countless cat accounts with an invented voice still follow.
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Nala Cat
Nala is here for what her fame turned into: the cat as a full-time influencer brand. Her owner adopted the Siamese and tabby mix from a California shelter in 2011 and started her Instagram account simply to share photos with friends and family. Steady posting and a very photogenic face did the rest.
On May 13, 2020, Guinness World Records verified nala_cat as the most-followed cat on Instagram, at 4,361,519 followers, and by then she had her own pet food line. Where earlier cats rode a single meme, Nala shows the slower, professional route to fame that most of today's pet accounts are chasing.
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Woman yelling at a cat
Smudge, the white cat at the dinner table
Smudge's half of the meme began as a stand-alone photo on Tumblr in June 2018: a white cat seated at a dinner table behind a plate of greens, wearing a look of pure contempt, captioned "he no like vegetals." In 2019 a Twitter user paired it with a tearful, shouting Taylor Armstrong from "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," and the two-panel argument became one of the defining formats of the year.
It is the best example here of a remix creating the fame. Neither image went far alone; together they became a template for every unhinged accusation and unbothered reply. Smudge, an Ottawa cat, never had to do anything but sit there.
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Popcat
Oatmeal, the cat behind Popcat
Two photos of a cat named Oatmeal, one with mouth closed and one with it wide open, were all it took. Oatmeal's owner shared them on Discord in October 2020, a friend turned them into a looping "pop" animation, and the clip spread across meme sites within days.
Popcat then became something you could play. A clicker website let visitors pop Oatmeal's mouth with every tap, and in August 2021 it went viral as people in Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia raced to push their countries up its leaderboard. Choose Popcat to see how a cat meme became interactive, and how national pride can be measured in clicks.
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Jorts (cat)
Jorts became famous without a single viral photo. In December 2021 a worker posted to Reddit's AITA forum about two office cats: Jean, a tortoiseshell, and Jorts, a large orange cat who kept pushing a door closed and was cast as the less clever of the pair. The office drama around them, including a coworker who had put margarine on Jorts to teach him to groom, read like a sitcom, and the internet followed every update.
What came next is why he belongs here. The poster launched a Twitter account for Jorts, and it quickly took up workers' causes, with posts such as "labor is entitled to all it creates." Jorts is the clearest case of a cat becoming a voice for a movement.
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OIIA Cat (Oo Ee A E A Spinning Cat)
Ethel, the rescue cat behind the spinning OIIA meme
The newest star here was famous for years before most fans knew her name. A picture of Ethel, a stubby-legged rescue cat, was first shared in a Facebook cat group in 2019. Separately, a fan's chirpy "oo ee a e a" vocal clip spread on TikTok in 2021. Chinese users put the two together, and the spinning-cat remixes took over Bilibili and YouTube in April 2023, then came roaring back on TikTok in December 2024, set to every pop song imaginable.
Ethel shows how fame works now: a sound and an image meet, strangers remix them endlessly, and only later does anyone trace the cat back to her owner.
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