Blog

In January 2007, a Hawaiian blogger named Eric Nakagawa posted a photo of a fat gray cat with the caption “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” on his new website. Within weeks, the site was getting millions of views and users were uploading their own cat photos with similar broken-English captions. The language, dubbed “lolspeak,” had its own grammar rules and vocabulary.

I Can Has Cheezburger became a venture-backed business, spawning books, games, and an entire empire of humor sites. More importantly, it legitimized the idea that image macros — photos with bold top-and-bottom text — were the native language of the internet. Every meme format since owes something to those grammatically broken cats.

In May 2007, a user on 4chan’s /v/ board posted what claimed to be a trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV. Clicking the link instead loaded the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The bait-and-switch was called “rickrolling,” and within months it had become a global internet prank.

Rick Astley himself performed the song during the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, surprise-rickrolling millions of live viewers. The YouTube video has been viewed over 1.5 billion times. Rickrolling is perhaps the most durable meme in internet history — a joke that has lasted nearly two decades because the punchline is always the same, and somehow always lands.

In September 2012, a Reddit user posted a photo of his sister’s cat Tardar Sauce, whose feline dwarfism and underbite gave her a permanently scowling expression. The photo hit the front page of Reddit in hours. Within days, Tardar Sauce — rechristened “Grumpy Cat” — was on every late-night show, magazine cover, and T-shirt.

Grumpy Cat became a brand. She appeared in a Lifetime holiday movie, had her own coffee line (Grumppuccino), got a wax figure at Madame Tussauds, and reportedly earned her owner close to $100 million before her death in 2019. Grumpy Cat proved that memes could be monetized into traditional celebrity. She was the first influencer cat — and the template for every animal internet star that followed.

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.

In August 2007, photographer Laney Griner took a photo of her 11-month-old son Sam at the beach. Sam was clenching a fistful of sand with a look of intense triumph on his face. She posted it to Flickr. The image spread like wildfire, becoming the template for celebrating small victories: “finally got the last parking spot,” “texted my crush back without typos.”

In 2015, Success Kid served a real purpose. Sam’s father needed a kidney transplant and the family couldn’t afford it. They launched a GoFundMe campaign using the meme. It raised over $100,000 in days. Success Kid is a rare story of a meme subject benefiting materially from going viral — proof that the internet can be generous when it wants to be.

The word “meme” was invented in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He needed a term for a cultural unit that spreads from mind to mind the way genes spread through bodies — an idea, tune, catchphrase, or fashion that replicates itself by imitation. He shortened the Greek “mimeme” (imitated thing) to “meme” to rhyme with “gene.”

Dawkins never imagined his scientific concept would become the name for cat photos and Pepe frogs, but the mechanism is exactly what he described. Internet memes are cultural genes — they mutate, compete for attention, and the fittest versions survive. Every LOLcat, Doge, and PEPE coin traces back to a scholarly footnote in a 1976 biology book.

In 1996, software company Kinetix released a sample 3D rendering of a cha-cha-dancing baby as part of a demo for their Character Studio animation software. An employee at LucasArts emailed it to friends, and within weeks the “Dancing Baby” was rippling through email forwards, the primitive social network of the 1990s. By 1997, it had appeared on Ally McBeal as a recurring hallucination.

The Dancing Baby is widely considered the first viral internet meme. It proved that a weird, context-free piece of content could replicate itself across the internet through pure oddity. Every meme that followed — from LOLcats to Doge — was born in the shadow of that creepy cha-cha baby.

In 1998, a Canadian art student named Deidre LaCarte built a simple website featuring rows of animated hamster GIFs dancing to a sped-up sample from Disney’s Robin Hood. She meant it as a competition with her sister and friend to see who could attract more web traffic. Within a year, the Hampster Dance page had millions of views and had become one of the first true internet phenomena.

The site was famously misspelled — “hampster” instead of “hamster” — and that typo became part of its charm. Hampster Dance proved that absurdity plus repetition plus a catchy loop could conquer the early web. It was the first meme to feel like a shared joke among everyone online.

In 1989, Japanese game company Toaplan released Zero Wing, a side-scrolling shooter with a legendarily bad English translation. The opening cutscene featured the villain CATS declaring “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.” For eleven years, the line sat unnoticed. Then in 2000, someone on the Something Awful forums rediscovered it, and within months “All Your Base” had flooded every corner of the early internet.

It became one of the first true copypasta memes, plastered on billboards, photoshopped into newspaper photos, and chanted at gaming conventions. The phrase proved that even a thirty-second clip from an obscure Japanese shooter could, with enough community energy, become a global inside joke.