Keyboard Cat: Play Him Off (2007)

Keyboard Cat began life in 1984, when Charlie Schmidt filmed his cat “Fatso” pawing at a Casio keyboard while wearing a blue shirt. The home video sat forgotten for 23 years. In 2007, Schmidt uploaded it to YouTube. In 2009, a user named Brad O’Farrell edited it to the end of a video of someone falling down stairs, captioned “play him off, Keyboard Cat.” The format exploded.

Keyboard Cat became the universal punctuation for every internet fail video. Public figures making mistakes, sports bloopers, news anchor gaffes — all were “played off” by Fatso’s blue-shirted musical interlude. Fatso passed away in 1987, long before his fame, but his ghost accompanied a decade of internet embarrassment.