Jul 25 2007
I Can Has Cheezburger. What am I Missing?
Via Trevor Cook I followed a link to Business Week entitled Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks (be sure to click on the slide show link at the end of the article, as there is a lot more information there).
The top case study is about “I can has Cheezburger“. John Tozzi starts
Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Hawaii, posted a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, “I can has cheezburger?” in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict.
Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000.
The Feedburner chicklet shows 20,000+ subscribers on top of those page views. What a phenomenal growth in just 6 months! And good luck to them.
But can someone please explain the appeal to me? A blog built up around pictures of cats with baby talk captions? O.K. so one or two might be cute, or elicit a chuckle, but doesn’t the appeal wear off with these LOL cats?
Is it any wonder kids these days have problem spelling?
23 Responses to “I Can Has Cheezburger. What am I Missing?”
Unashamedly I admit I love lolcats, I am one of those many feed subscribers. Not all of them are great, but some a quite funny, and the captions are very clever…really they are, I know you don’t believe me LOL
I think it’s one of those things you either get it, and think its highly amusing..or you don’t and just think it is beyond ridiculous.
There are many cat blogs, where the cats blog, and for some reason cats have no sense of grammer and spelling (apparently..though my cats don’t have this issue LOL) That, I don’t get. I think some people go a little far and it gets all to strange weird and creepy. But I guess that’s were it stems from.
I wouldn’t call it baby talk, it’s more some kind of hybrid language that is set to replace English in 2026.
THANK YOU Meg for daring to admit to not “getting” it. Almost every time I log into WordPress I Can Has Cheezburger is at the top of the hot blogs list and I always say to myself “what the heck am I missing?”. Being out of step with the rest of the world is a common occurence for me but it is nice to know I’m not the only one who’s missing what everyone else is “getting”.
@ Leigh – thanks for putting your hand up 😉
“I wouldn’t call it baby talk, it’s more some kind of hybrid language that is set to replace English in 2026”
Oh please say it isn’t so!
@ Thinking girl – hey, nice to see you. Thanks for backing me up
It’ll be interesting to see if there’s more of us.
Meg, I’m with you on this one. I’ve seen this site recommended quite a bit for being funny etc but it doesn’t appeal to me for a couple of reasons. One, I’m not a cat person, and two, the language bit I don’t get. I guess because I’m a professional writer, just about any abuse of the language even in jest doesn’t really sit well with me. It will be interesting to see if the popularity continues.
A website along kind of similar lines (very loosely) is Passive aggressive notes – http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/. It appeals to me much more because it shows just what some humans are like and it makes more sense to me..
Hi Jen
I’m not a professional writer, but I agree with the language bit – I find it really irritating. I wonder what the teachers amongst us think?
Having a quick look at the link you sent – that seems much more “me”,
I think the same thing. The site is always in the top few on wordpress but why I have no idea. It’s not funny and the poor writing! I thought it was because a non-english speaking blogger was doing it.
I just don’t get it.
I don’t get it either; I like that passive-aggressive notes site though 😉
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
@ goldcoaster – agreed, and it seems to be an epidemic, not just restricted to this site!
@ Sephyroth – I just spent way too long going through those notes. There’s some classics
thankyou Jen for that passive-agressive notes website – it has made my week – THAT is what I call humour
Most people love pictures of cats.. I thought the text was more like l33t sp33k, that hacker style talk. I used to like lolcats but I was pretty offended one time when I was scrolling through a bunch of lolcats and the text on one referred to rape like it was something funny, so I’ve never looked at them again.
Actually it probably is more like Ali G speak than anything else..
Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org/
I guess that proves that there’s a market for every possibly niche out there – no matter how inane the topic.
The extremely poor grammar just goes too far in being well … just plain bad. I fully appreciate subtle, simple play on words but this is just stoopid.
I admit at first I didn’t get it, but then I lightened up and being a cat person, I can appreciate the humour in most of the captions. The bad spelling just heightens that effect, and is quite different to ignorant emo style shorthand found on myspace (which I hate).
You make bunny cry (http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/01/11/you-make-bunny-cry/) by criticising I Can Has Cheezburger!
😀
OK Andy, if you say so 😉 .
I’m not criticising per se, there’s obviously a strong appeal – just not to me.
I’d hate to make a bunny cry – don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight… 😉
I don’t particularly like lolcats either. Although lolgoths are pretty cool. I found I Can Haz Cheesburger after I noticed it getting in WordPress top blogs about 25,000 times in a row. Most of them are very weak in my opinion, although the first walrus one was funny.
I just don’t like “cute” humour, I guess.
Actually I have a bit of different view – it’s not done to be ‘cute’ nor because people are fans of pets, but a tribal humour element.
What happens in social networks is that they take the mickey out of their own group behaviours. So every few years we see l337speak (also called leet or elite speak) spring up again. Rarely is it done seriously – and a youth community will flame anyone who DOES take it seriously. The whole “i r teh best, i pwn j00 kthnxbai” is a way of saying “I won but don’t take it too seriously, it’s just online, not real”.
Recently the media has picked up on blogs as inane scribblings. Not surprisingly since Citizen Media is a threat 😛 The most common stance is that whole thing of ‘blogs are full of people writing about their CAT’. All that guy did was take a known tribal behaviour (l337 speak) and match it to another expected meme (blogs about pets) and mash it up. No wonder it was popular!
I hope I didn’t ramble on too much. *waves* kthnxbaicul8r
oh and YMMV.
Hi Laurel
No, not at all (rambling), actually thanks for taking the time to explain it, because the appeal makes more sense now.
“YMMV” – okay, I had to Google that one 😉 “Your mileage may vary” aka “that’s my opinion, but yours might differ”. Agreed, still not my cuppa tea, but I do “get it” a bit better. Thanks 😀
A sense of humour?
@ Schrodingers Lolcat – HAHA, now that’s funny 😀
Although Laurel has a point, I don’t believe that explains the popularity. Memes have to be multi-faceted, and Cheezburger is a beauty.
The text in many cases is a reference to the way that cats (and other animals) might type, were they capable of doing so. Cat owners like to think of cats doing human things. But they know – or at least believe – that cats would be a little crude in the social and technological sense.
If you don’t get Gary Larson’s “Cow Tools” cartoon, you won’t get *this*. It’s not just cutesy – it’s a comment on how we view our pets, how they interface with us, and how we think their society would be if it mirrored ours.
Hi CeeJay
Many thanks for your explanation. I’m slowly “getting” the appeal – for others.
CeeJay yeah I agree, there’s lots of layers to this one.
And to make a generalisation: developers relate themselves to cats – lone souls programming into the night, ninja/hacker cats with no respect for the rules, I-walk-my-own-path is very cat AND developer-like.
Over the last fifteen, twenty, years, I’ve noticed developers -specifically code cutters- make reference a lot to little old ladies with LOTS of cats, brewing cups of tea. It would happen in DevChat – “I bet you are just some old girl in a basement with, like, all these cats” and stuff would spring out of that. I didn’t understand it at the time. But now I think it might be because of a secret fear that some geeks have – that one day s/he will find themselves old, unloved, still sitting at home alone, programming in a dim room, with only cats for company. *laughs* They were right! 😛
I’ve noticed that a cat-like disengagement is an goal for developers – but when they DO become engaged, words fly onto the page, arguing some strange philosophy about coding no doubt. Invariably with bad spelling. Which is then held up ironically by readers who are not passionately engaged. The original emo-chat was from programmers! Its interesting for me to see how these little tribal secret handshakes jump social network fences. Having had to douse waaaay too many flame wars, I’ve noticed that the minute the spelling/grammar goes downhill, so does the conversation. Anyway, no doubt there are as many different interpretations of lolcode as readers, which is why its so universal.
“But can someone please explain the appeal to me?”
I’m glad you asked. The humour comes from the interplay between the pictures of cats, and the captions. It can be compartmentalised into (a) pictures of cats behaving like human beings, which creates a pleasing mental dissonance between the cat and mankind, and perhaps reinforces our mental stereotype of human behaviour, or (b) pictures of cats behaving like cats, but amplified to such an extent that the cat becomes a parody of a cat, or reinforces our mental stereotype of cat behaviour, or (c) absurdist pictures, captions, or combinations thereof, or (d) the occasional unexpected or totally new idea that derails rational thought. Humour essentially derives from a mixture of mental dissonance, the derailment of rational thought, and the confoundment of expectations. It is not funny to watch a tasered man fall to the floor in pain, because that is expected; but if the man exploded, or burst like a balloon, that would be funny, because it would derail rational thought, and it would confound our expectations – or, at least, it would confound the expectations of a sane man – and it would create mental dissonance. It would be shocking, but absurd.
Neither the image nor the caption need necessarily be funny in itself, although it is typical at I Can Has Cheezburger? for the image to be funny – perhaps the cat looks silly, as in the example about, or resembles a comical person, or its actions resemble comical human behaviour – and the caption reinforces or comments on this. However the site also has conventional images of normal cats behaving in expected ways, with captions that have the effect of creating an unexpected reality in the mind of the audience. And there are pictures of funny cats with unexceptional captions, and there are also images that are simply not funny because they are dull, or executed poorly. In the case of the example above, of the cat who is hung over, the humour comes from a mixture of the dissonating image (cats do not usually wear facemasks), and from the implication that its behaviour is like that of a naughty human being. The caption simply reinforces this latter attribute. It speaks our thoughts for us.
The internet-speak is part of the site’s “magical fairy dust”, one of the things that sets it apart. The use of patois to express the cat’s inner voice gives the impression that the cats are silly or juvenile (and thus not genuinely menacing, or sinister), and indeed several captions create humour by attributing menacing, sinister thoughts to the cat, in such a way that the medium of internet-speak undercuts any genuine menace. Thus, whereas a photograph of a large cat captioned “I will dominate the world” would be disturbing, the same photograph captioned “I will rulez ur wlrd K rly” is hilarious. In fact I am laughing inwardly as I type those words. I can barely contain myself. The internet-speak is typically used as a mockery of stupidity, rather than of genuinely stupid people, because that would be unpleasant. The cats are usually portrayed as vain, or greedy, or lazy, or flawed, but not mentally backwards. They are reflections of ourselves. Furthermore, the use of internet-speak gives the site an underground quality, that makes the audience believe it is part of a cult, rather than simply the unloved target of an impersonal paid advertisement.
Ashley
Many thanks for taking so much time with your analysis. Your explanation is certainly interesting.