I can has cheezburger ... and pathos?

The lolcats, the Internet's most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.

By Jay Dixit

Read more: Internet, Satire, Humor, Animals, cats, Jay Dixit, Life, Dixit Jay

Nov. 15, 2008 | The first time I saw a lolcat -- those funny images of felines with grammatically questionable captions -- it took me a minute to understand the joke.

"What's with the misspellings?" I wrote the friend who'd IM'd me the link. "Cats are dumb and can't spell?"

"Pretty much," my friend replied.

"And they have bad grammar?" I wrote, still processing the idea.

"Yes," he wrote. "Get it?"

I did. In fact, I couldn't stop laughing.

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, "I Can Has Cheezburger," published by Gotham Books.

I love lolcats. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Sure, they've been around for almost two years -- but the site posts fresh new jokes every day, and I'm never disappointed.

But what draws me to the site even more than what's funny is what's sad. My favorite lolcats are not the rapscallions pining for "cheezburgers" or helpfully upgrading your RAM, but rather a brilliant and underappreciated subgenre of sad lolcats -- tragic figures of grief, yearning and unrequited love. But I'll come back to that.

What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past -- the motivational posters of the '70s and '80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament -- is that lolcats aren't trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there. Even the YouTube cats of today perform characteristically catlike actions, repeatedly flushing toilets, dragging their paws along piano keys or getting flung off the ends of treadmills.

Lolcats are different in that the characters they portray -- and yes, they are portraying characters -- don't represent cats at all. They're a completely different kind of beast, mischievous (if incompetent) rascals, scheming for cheeseburgers and stopping at nothing to get them.

Take the lolcat that started it all, created by a Hawaiian blogger named Eric Nakagawa, who posted it in January 2007. The image features a cat with a crazed look of pure animal hunger, its eyes maniacal with desire, asking, "I can has cheezburger?" Underneath is the comment: "The Internet's piece de resistance, the website's raison d'etre."

This ur-lolcat created such a sensation that Nakagawa turned it into a blog, spawning not only the eponymous Web site but also a whole mythology. The cheezburger has become the Philosopher's Stone of the lolcats mythos -- the most prized, cherished and elusive object in their universe. It is for this reason that, when a tiny kitten being sniffed by a Great Dane 20 times its size needs a quick escape, it says, "I iz not cheezburger, kthxbai." It is for this reason that when a user finds a photo of a cat sitting by the window with its paws in its lap, the caption reads, "I iz waitin for cheezburger man. Does you have a money?"

The Web is now spawning a wave of next-generation lolcats sites that take the lolcats concept and run with it. There's lolpresident, loldogs, and even lolhan, a site devoted to Lindsay Lohan that includes such classics as "I layded you an egg but I'z hidin it."

There's lolcats magnetic poetry, lolcats translators, even a lolcats Bible Translation Project that renders familiar verses into Standard Feline English. The Supreme Being in the lolcats cosmology is "Ceiling Cat," a meme that began with a photograph of a cat peering down from a hole in the ceiling -- "Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate" -- then became so standard that this feline deity is now routinely worshiped.

Thus, Genesis 1:1 is rendered as, "Oh hai! In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez an da Urfs." (Satan, of course, is represented by a black cat called Basement Cat.)

This is all funny stuff. But I submit that the true genius of lolcats lies in their tragedy.

In one classic example, one cat is crying, and another is hugging it and saying, "Don't crai. We'll get cheezburger someday." It's sweet and poignant and wistful all at the same time. Life can be hard, it says, and we don't always get what we want, but even as we long for things we may never have, we draw succor from the reassurances of those we love. Sure, it's ridiculous that what the cat is yearning for is a cheeseburger. But the cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger -- it's a symbol.

Here's another: A brown and black calico looks out the window of his apartment only to notice a beautiful white female on the balcony across the way. His heart quickens, in the scenario I imagine, then he swallows hard and quickly looks away, unable to muster the courage to speak to her. The caption: "Evry dayz, 3 o'clockz ... Mebe one day I sez meow to her." Who among us hasn't felt that longing and regret? Who among us hasn't passed an attractive stranger in the supermarket or on the street, only to kick ourselves afterward for letting the opportunity slip between our fingers?

In fact, there's a whole species of the genus Lol devoted to the tragic: the "lolwalruses," or "lolruses." If lolcats are incorrigible little rascals, lolruses are romantic heroes, born to suffer, whose lives are dominated by the exquisite misery of love lost. The lolrus meme originated with a single diptych. The first panel displays the walrus lovingly cradling a bucket, a look of absurd delight on its face. In the second panel, a trainer is ripping the bucket away as the walrus looks on in helpless panic. And the saga of the lolrus and its beloved bucket takes off from there.

Clearly, I'm moved by these pictures. But what is it about the lolruses and the sad lolcats that is so gut-wrenching?

Next page: The New Yorker cartoon editor on the genius of Lolcats