The Complete History of Cat Memes: From Victorian Cabinet Cards to AI Brainrot

The history of cat memes is older than YouTube, older than smartphones, and older than the word “meme” itself. Cats have been photographed in goofy poses with captions since the 1870s, when British photographer Harry Pointer printed his staged cats on cabinet cards for Victorian collectors. The history of cat memes runs parallel to the history of the internet. This guide walks the full timeline, from Pointer’s cards to Nyan Cat, from Caturday on 4chan to AI brainrot in 2026. You will learn who started Caturday, why LOLcats broke containment, how Grumpy Cat earned a reported 100 million dollars, and why cats keep winning the internet.

Table of Contents

• Cat Memes Before the Internet (1870s to 1990s)
• The Early Web Cat Era (1995 to 2004)
• LOLcats, Caturday, and the I Can Has Cheezburger Empire (2005 to 2007)
• Keyboard Cat and the YouTube Viral Wave (2007 to 2010)
• Nyan Cat, Maru, and the Animated Era (2010 to 2012)
• Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, and the Celebrity Cat Economy (2012 to 2019)
• TikTok, Cat Influencers, and Short Form (2020 to 2024)
• AI Cat Memes and Brainrot (2024 to 2026)
• FAQ

Cat Memes Before the Internet (1870s to 1990s)

The history of cat memes does not start with the web. It starts with Victorian photographer Harry Pointer, who ran a studio in Brighton in the 1870s and produced over 200 staged cat photographs, often with hand-written captions like “Bring up the dinner Betsy” or “Five o’clock tea.” Pointer sold these as cabinet cards, the social media of his day, and they were collected and mailed across England. The format is unmistakable: a cat doing something absurd, paired with a caption that reads as the cat’s inner monologue.

Harry Whittier Frees and the Costume Cat

By the 1900s, American photographer Harry Whittier Frees pushed the genre further, dressing kittens in tiny outfits and publishing the results in books and postcards. His work, much of which is now public domain, anticipates by a full century the look of modern cat content on Instagram. The aesthetic was already locked in: cute animal, small props, captioned humor, anthropomorphic framing.

The Word “Meme” Arrives

The word meme itself was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a unit of cultural transmission. Dawkins was thinking about ideas, melodies, and catchphrases that replicate from brain to brain, not cats. But the framework still works: a cat photo with text becomes a meme not because it is funny once, but because it spreads, mutates, and gets remixed.

The Early Web Cat Era (1995 to 2004)

The first wave of internet cat content lived on Usenet newsgroups and personal homepages. The newsgroup rec.pets.cats hosted FAQ documents written between 1992 and 1995, and cat photos were among the earliest image attachments shared in those threads. The bandwidth was tiny and the audience small, but the behavior was already familiar: people wanted to show off their cats, and strangers wanted to look at them.

MyCatHatesYou and the First Cat Blogs

Single-topic cat blogs started appearing around 2000. MyCatHatesYou.com launched as a dedicated cat photo blog, while The Infinite Cat Project (started in 2004) collected photos of cats looking at photos of cats, eventually growing past 1,800 entries. These projects were not designed to go viral. They were designed for a small group of cat people to share consistently, which became the substrate the next decade exploded out of.

The Tech That Made It Possible

Three changes set the stage for the LOLcat era. Broadband internet rolled out in homes between 2000 and 2005. Digital cameras and camera phones made cat photos free and instantaneous. Image hosting platforms like Photobucket and Flickr made it trivial to embed a photo into a forum post. By 2005 every piece of infrastructure was in place, and all it took was one weekend ritual to light the fuse.

LOLcats, Caturday, and the I Can Has Cheezburger Empire (2005 to 2007)

This is the chapter that most people mean when they talk about the history of cat memes. It starts on the imageboard 4chan in 2005, where users began posting cat photos every Saturday under the tag “Caturday.” The origin story is unclear, but one theory traces it back to a protest against “Furry Friday” threads. Whatever the spark, by mid-2005, Caturday was a weekly ritual on 4chan’s /b/ board, and the format had crystallized: a cat photo with bold, broken-English captions in white sans-serif text.

I Can Has Cheezburger Launches

In January 2007, a Hawaii-based programmer named Eric Nakagawa posted a single image to a friend: a gray British Shorthair with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” The photo had been circulating in small circles. Nakagawa bought the domain icanhascheezburger.com and built a simple WordPress site so friends could upload more. Within four months the site was getting 200,000 daily visits.

The Lolspeak Grammar Rules

LOLcats had a specific grammar called lolspeak or kitty pidgin. Verbs were misconjugated on purpose. Plurals broke. Sentences ended with “k thx bai.” This was not laziness, it was deliberate stylization, and it gave the format a recognizable signature that worked across thousands of images. By June 2007 Time Magazine had run a feature on the phenomenon. By 2009 I Can Has Cheezburger had been acquired for 2 million dollars.

Why LOLcats Mattered

LOLcats were the first meme format to break out of internet subcultures and into mainstream culture. They were printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs, referenced on network television, and they normalized the idea that ordinary people could caption photos and beat professional comedy. For more on how this era reshaped internet culture, the chain runs straight from Caturday to TikTok.

Keyboard Cat and the YouTube Viral Wave (2007 to 2010)

While LOLcats were dominating image macros, YouTube was opening up video memes for the first time. Cat videos hit the platform almost immediately, and a few specific clips defined the format.

Keyboard Cat

The original Keyboard Cat video was filmed in 1984 by Charlie Schmidt, who manipulated his orange tabby Fatso’s paws to make him appear to play a cheerful tune. Schmidt uploaded it to YouTube in June 2007 and for two years almost nobody watched. Then in 2009 the blog Urlesque paired it with fail compilation videos under the caption “Play him off, Keyboard Cat.” The format exploded, and by 2010 Keyboard Cat had appeared in network commercials and on late-night television.

The Cat Video Genre Forms

Between 2007 and 2010 YouTube’s algorithm started actively surfacing cat videos. Surprised Kitty (2009) crossed 100 million views within a few years. Henri, le Chat Noir, a moody black-and-white short series filmed by an art student in Seattle, went viral in 2007 and won a Friskies-sponsored award. These clips set the template that would later define TikTok and Reels.

Nyan Cat, Maru, and the Animated Era (2010 to 2012)

In April 2011 artist Christopher Torres uploaded an animation of a gray cat with the body of a Pop-Tart, flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail. Set to a sample of the Japanese pop song “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!”, the clip ran on an endless loop and within weeks it was a global meme. Nyan Cat was the first major meme to merge animated cartoon with an unaltered cat photograph.

Maru: The Japanese Box Cat

While the United States exported animated cat memes, Japan exported Maru, a Scottish Fold obsessed with cardboard boxes. Maru’s owner uploaded short, beautifully edited clips of the cat jumping into, sliding through, and getting stuck inside boxes of every shape. By 2012 Maru had over 200 million video views and a Guinness World Record, setting the standard for the modern cat YouTube channel.

Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, and the Celebrity Cat Economy (2012 to 2019)

On September 22, 2012, Bryan Bundesen posted a photo of his sister Tabatha’s cat Tardar Sauce to Reddit. The cat had feline dwarfism and an underbite, which together produced a face of permanent disapproval. Within 48 hours, the photo had been viewed several million times, and Tardar Sauce had a new name: Grumpy Cat.

The Grumpy Cat Empire

Grumpy Cat became the first internet cat to be aggressively monetized. The Bundesen family signed with talent agency Ben Lashes, who also represented Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat. They licensed Grumpy Cat to coffee brand Grenade Beverage, published New York Times bestselling books, and starred her in a Lifetime Christmas movie. Reports estimated the cat’s lifetime earnings at over 100 million dollars before her death in May 2019. Whether that number is accurate is debated, but Grumpy Cat unquestionably proved cat memes could be a serious business.

Lil Bub and the Charity Cat

In November 2011, just before Grumpy Cat, a permanently kittenish black-and-white cat named Lil Bub was photographed by owner Mike Bridavsky and posted to Tumblr. Lil Bub had dwarfism, polydactyly, and a tongue that stuck out. Bridavsky used Bub’s celebrity to raise over 700,000 dollars for animal charities before her death in 2019. The Lil Bub era set a template that current cat lifestyle influencers still follow.

Other Celebrity Cats of the Era

This was also the decade of Colonel Meow (Guinness record for longest fur), Hamilton the Hipster Cat (white mustache), and Venus the Two-Faced Cat (split face coloring). Each earned more attention than most human entertainers.

TikTok, Cat Influencers, and Short Form (2020 to 2024)

The 2020s shifted cat memes from static images to vertical short video. TikTok rewarded fast cuts, trending audio, and a 15 to 60 second runtime, and cat content adapted instantly. Specific cat formats took over: cats vibing to music, cats reacting to mirrors, cats sitting in geometric “cat squares” drawn in tape on the floor, cats failing to jump.

Famous TikTok Cats

Cats like Stepan (Ukrainian gray tabby who won an MTV award in 2022), Nala Cat (most-followed cat on Instagram with over 4 million followers), and Pesto the Penguin Cat (a massive Maine Coon kitten from Australia who went viral in 2024) defined the new era. Pesto hit a billion-plus combined views in his first year, faster than any cat before him.

Sound-Based Meme Formats

Audio-driven memes became dominant. “Chipi Chipi Chapa Chapa,” based on a Hungarian song, was set to a clip of Bingus the cat dancing in 2023 and generated millions of remixes. Matching a real cat clip to an absurd song or sound effect became one of the dominant comedy patterns on TikTok by 2024, building directly on the visual grammar LOLcats invented two decades earlier.

AI Cat Memes and Brainrot (2024 to 2026)

The most recent chapter in the history of cat memes is AI-generated. Starting in 2024, image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion made it trivial to create photo-realistic cats in absurd scenarios. AI cat content tends to fall into a category that English-speaking internet users now call “brainrot,” meaning content that is hypnotically engaging, often nonsensical, and designed for infinite scroll consumption.

Italian Brainrot Cats

One sub-genre that exploded in late 2024 and early 2025 was Italian brainrot, featuring AI-generated cats fused with food items and given fake Italian names like “Tralalero Tralala” or “Tung Tung Tung Sahur.” These memes use synthesized voiceovers in fake Italian and have generated billions of views on TikTok and Instagram. They mark the first time in cat meme history when the cat itself is fully synthetic.

The Authenticity Question

From Harry Pointer in 1872 through Grumpy Cat in 2012, every successful cat meme involved a real, photographable animal. That contract is now broken. Whether AI cats will take over or whether audiences will push back and reward authenticity is one of the open questions in this corner of AI culture heading into the second half of the 2020s.

Why Cat Memes Keep Winning

Across 150 years of changing technology, cat memes have outlasted every other internet format because they hit a perfect intersection. Cats are visually expressive, common (over 600 million pet cats globally), emotionally legible without language, and small enough to fit in a frame. As long as people share images online, cats will be the dominant subject. Our history of internet memes guide covers the broader meme universe, our memes and internet history archive tracks each new wave, and our science coverage goes deeper on the behaviors behind viral cat clips.

FAQ

What was the first cat meme?

The first cat memes were Harry Pointer’s captioned cabinet card photos from the 1870s in Brighton, England, which featured staged cats with handwritten captions like “Bring up the dinner Betsy.” On the internet specifically, the first viral cat meme was Caturday on 4chan, which started in 2005 as a weekly ritual of posting cat photos every Saturday, eventually evolving into the LOLcat format.

When did cat memes become mainstream?

Cat memes became fully mainstream in 2007, when I Can Has Cheezburger launched and was covered by Time Magazine within five months. By 2009 the site had been acquired for 2 million dollars and LOLcat merchandise was sold in major retailers. Grumpy Cat in 2012 then took cat memes from internet phenomenon to network television and licensed product status.

Who is the most famous cat meme?

By cultural footprint, Grumpy Cat is the most famous individual cat meme, with reported lifetime earnings over 100 million dollars and appearances in books, films, and major brand campaigns. By view count, Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat have generated billions of combined plays. By current relevance, Maine Coons like Pesto the Penguin Cat dominate short-form video as of 2026.

Why are cats so popular on the internet?

Cats are popular on the internet because they hit a perfect content intersection. They are visually expressive without requiring language, common enough that millions of households have a camera-ready subject, and small enough to fit in a frame. Cat behaviors like sitting in tape squares, knocking things off tables, and reacting to cucumbers are repeatable across countless owners, which keeps the supply of viral material constant.

What is the difference between a cat meme and a cat video?

A cat meme is any unit of cat-themed content that gets shared and remixed, including image macros, GIFs, and short videos. A cat video is specifically video content, a subset of the meme category. Keyboard Cat is both, while LOLcats are cat memes but not cat videos. In 2026 the boundary has mostly dissolved, since most viral cat content lives as short vertical video on TikTok or Reels.

Conclusion

The history of cat memes is the internet seen through a single lens. From Pointer’s Victorian cabinet cards to AI Italian brainrot, cats have anchored every major shift in how visual content spreads online. Each platform brought a new cat format, and each format trained the next generation of users on what was funny and shareable. If you want to predict where memes are heading, watch the cats first. They are usually a year ahead.