Many people in the world have pet cats and seem to think that cats are funny. A lot of materials regarding cat humor can be found in the television and the internet and this ranges from videos of cats to joke books. The popularity of cats is further evidenced by the advent of an internet culture based off cat humor.
What humans find comical about cats is the way these domestic animals mimic human activities in a poorly executed manner. In an activity such as standing in front of a mirror, cats react very differently from humans. A typical reaction is one where a cat, out of curiosity, walks towards the mirror gingerly, only to be scared by their own reflection and jumping away from the mirror quickly. The cat’s fearful reception towards the mirror provides much of the laughter for humans. In order to spread the amusement cats bring, many funny cat actions have been caught on video.
Besides funny videoes, digitally edited images of cats can be found anywhere on the world wide web. These cats are shown either carrying out an everyday human activity or holding some form of modern equipment. Photos usually depict this domestic pet caught in bizarre poses and captions are then edited onto the image. These type of humorous images are called “lolcat”. In many online forums and chat sites, a special version of English known as internet slang is often used. “lol” is one such abbreviation of the English “laugh out loud” which is usually used to show amusement at something.
A sample lolcat could be one where a cat is caught standing in its hind legs and its right front leg stretched up to the right. With a caption, the image editor could give the impression that the cat is a rock and roll star. Sometimes, a picture with a cat in a regular sitting pose would be used, but the key to the humor is coming up with the appropriate caption that suits the image.
The language used for the captions are meant to create humor as well. Parodied off internet slang that is most often riddled with ungrammatical sentences and misspelled words, this language or slang has been named “lolspeak” or “kitty pidgin”. Enthusiasts wishing to learn this slang could find guides easily on the internet.
The rules of lolspeak is highly dependent on grammatical errors. This would include inaccurate usage of the verb “to be”, or using the wrong tenses in a sentence. Words could be rearranged so that regular English sentence structure is ignored.
Spelling errors are a good thing in lolspeak. Similar sounding consonants can be substituted for one another and the English definite article “the” should be misspelled as “teh”. Emotions can be shown through text by using a disproportionate amount of exclamation marks or using a long list of internet slang short forms to form a single word.
While funny cat video has always been a staple in game shows featuring home videos, lolcat has gone so far as to catch attention from the news and entertainment media. This cultural phenomena has even caught on with other popular domestic animals such as dogs and rabbits, forming “loldogs”, “lolrabbits” and so on. The bible has been translated into kitty pidgin as a parody and a comic book based off lolcat was published in 2008. With so much focus on cat humor, cats must be really funny!
