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.