Kitties gone wired
You may not actually laugh out loud, but these bits of bizarre humor could elicit a chuckle. Or a groan.
By By JAY CRIDLIN
Published June 1, 2007
The Internet is a strange and confusing place.
Only online can a man lip-synching to a European pop tune in front of his computer become a bona fide superstar. Only online can a clip of a Hong Kong man berating a fellow bus passenger be revered as a work of art.
Now, from the minds that brought you "Boom Goes the Dynamite" and the Chuck Norris Fact Generator, comes a new World Wide Fad with which you can waste your precious time: the lolcat.
A lolcat is a funny photo onto which some enterprising humorist has typed a cutesy, cryptic or just plain absurdist caption. Here, take a look at this one:
You see? The kitty looks like he's eating a sandwich . . . but there isn't a sandwich there! So the joke is that the sandwich in the kitty's paws is actually invisible!
Pause, while you ROTFLOL.
Don't get it? Don't worry. Lolcats - which take their name from the acronym LOL ("laughing out loud") and the cats, which feature prominently in many of the photos - are a bit of an acquired taste.
Full of impish misspellings and unfortunate grammatical syntax, lolcats might just be the epitome of dumb Internet humor. They feel like stupid inside jokes, designed for stoners by stoners, that took two seconds to create.
Except . . . except . . . some of them are actually kind of amusing. Some of them, in fact, are chuckle-out-loud funny. And in recent weeks, lolcats have started popping up on more and more mainstream blogs and Web sites, like Slate, Fark, Wonkette and BoingBoing.
Influential blogger Anil Dash recently coined a term, "kitty pidgin, " for the way the animals in these images "talk." They are usually found holding invisible objects, or asking for food (often, for reasons unknown, a cheeseburger).
Now we're seeing "lolpresidents, " which are basically lolcats with a political theme.
No one knows when lolcats started or where they originated, though Slate's Michael Agger posits the trend evolved from quirkily captioned images posted in message-board threads.
When Agger asked the anonymous blogger who runs the lolcat site I Can Haz Cheezburger (www. icanhascheezburger.com) why lolcats are so popular - the site launched in January and gets a reported 250, 000 hits a day - the blogger simply said: "It's the Internet."
Oh. That explains it.
"You've got the kittens, which are cute, " said Gordon McNaughton, 28, creator of the interactive site LolCat Buildr (www.kscakes.com/LolCats). "And then you have the comments, which fit Internet humor really well. They're snarky. They often have an edge to them. Some of them are downright mean or offensive. But other times, it's just cute. It enhances it."
Part of the appeal, he said, is that lolcats are easy to make; users have created some 16, 000 lolcat images through his site. "Web 2.0 humor, " he calls it. And as dumb as lolcats look, there's a certain art to creating a good one.
"Most of them? Not that funny, " McNaughton said. "The ones I've created? Not that funny. But there are gems in there."
McNaughton believes the lolcat fad has yet to assume its rightful place in the cultural zeitgeist. When your average Joe Username starts forwarding homemade lolcats around your office, then you'll know lolcats have gone pop.
So be prepared. The lolcats are here. They're in ur computrz, cracking up yur kidz. And they're starting to settle in.
"Is this something that's going to be around six months from now?" McNaughton asks. "No one knows. Probably. It's got the compelling power of kittens behind it, and that should not be overlooked."
Jay Cridlin may be reached at jcridlin@tampabay.com