Bottom Line: As we may have mentioned before, the Internet loves cats. It really, really loves cats. LOLCats is a classic meme that is still running strong. Combine a picture of a cat doing something silly with an adorable broken English catch phrase and you have an instant meme.

A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name “lolcat” is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation “LOL” and the word “cat”. A synonym for “lolcat” is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro. Lolcats are designed for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums.

The term lolcat gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time, which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have “a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them]“.

Meme Anatomy: WTF, Animals, Iconic Catchphrase

Urban Dictionary

Hilarious pictures of cats (or sometimes other animals) in cute and/or strange poses with a funny made-up caption. The most popular caption is “I can has cheeseburger?”

[Link]

Other Sources

Videos: LOLCats

Pictures: LOLCats

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 19,000 – 4
Photo Search Results: 3,500,000 – 5
Search Volume: 1,100,000 – 4
Blog Search Results: 180,646 – 4
News Search Results: 308 – 3

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Bottom Line: The Internet loves cute animals, this is a proven fact, if you can get a cute animals to do something that only human beings should be doing odds are 3 to 1 that you have a meme on your hands. Keyboard Cat is a brilliant example of just this fact.

Keyboard Cat is an Internet meme. It consists of footage of “Fatso”, a cat (now deceased) owned by Charlie Schmidt of Spokane, Washington, wearing a blue shirt and “playing” an upbeat rhythm on an electronic keyboard, in reality being manipulated like a puppet by Schmidt. The clip, originally posted to YouTube as “Charlie Schmidt’s ‘cool cat’”, has gained popularity by being appended to blooper and other viral videos as if to “play” that person offstage after the mistake or gaffe in a similar manner as getting the hook in the days of vaudeville, usually accompanied with the title Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat or a variant. The first such video was created by Brad O’Farrell, who secured Schmidt’s permission to use the footage. Over four thousand such videos now exist, with a website playhimoffkeyboardcat.com created to collect such videos.

Meme Anatomy: Musical, Animals, WTF

Urban Dictionary

An awesome cat with the ability to play the keyboard. Often put at the end of a video of someone failing at something and getting hurt; with the title “play him/her off, keyboard cat”

[Link]

Other Sources

Videos: Keyboard Cat

Pictures: Keyboard Cat

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 9,020 – 4
Photo Search Results: 82,400 – 4.5
Search Volume: 8,080,000 – 4.5
Blog Search Results: 48,210 – 3.5
News Search Results: 66 – 2.5

Overall Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

Bottom Line: Cute animals doing weird things are Internet gold. Whether it is a bug eye’d owl or a Panda cub sneezing. Dramatic Chipmunk is no exception.

Fact: The dramatic “Chipmunk” is actually a prairie dog.

Meme Anatomy: Animals, WTF, Overreactions

Urban Dictionary

The legendary chipmunk featured on a top college humor video clip. The chipmunk is obviously distressed and his reaction is epic. The dramatic chipmunk is actually a prarie dog, but no one seems to care. He is god. It can also be used as a noun of which to call someone.

Other Sources

Videos: Dramatic Chipmunk

Pictures: Dramatic Chipmunk

Meme Strength

Video Search Results: 7,360 – 3.5
Photo Search Results: 636 – 2.5
Search Volume: 157,000 – 3
Blog Search Results: 14,092 – 3
News Search Results: 105 – 4

Overall Rating: 3.2 out of 5 stars