Video and captioned pictures
LOLcats and I Can Has Cheezburger?
2007
LOLcats are photos of cats with captions in deliberately broken English, like I can has cheezburger? They were shared on the image board 4chan from about 2005, in Saturday threads called Caturday, and a blog named after that caption, started on 11 January 2007, made them famous.
- Year
- 11 January 2007
- Made by
- Image board users, then Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami’s blog
- Where it started
- Caturday threads on 4chan, then the blog I Can Has Cheezburger?
- What it was
- Cat photos with misspelled captions
- Also called
- Lolcat, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Caturday
The story
Funny captioned cat pictures are older than the internet: in the 1870s the English photographer Harry Pointer posed his cats in comic scenes and wrote captions on the cards. The most famous lolcat, a smiling grey cat later known as Happy Cat, had been online for years before someone added the words I can has cheezburger?
That one picture launched the blog, started by Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Honolulu, and his friend Kari Unebasami. Readers made most of the pictures with a captioning tool and voted on them, traffic doubled every month in spring 2007, and in September a company led by Ben Huh bought the site and built a family of humour sites around it.
The captions grew into a language of their own, LOLspeak, which linguists found had rules people could follow or break on purpose, and in 2007 volunteers began retelling the whole Bible in it.
Why it matters
It showed that an inside joke from image boards could reach everyone and pay its way, and it was built by its audience: anyone could caption a photo and send it in, and readers’ votes decided what reached the front page.
Where it is now
Cheezburger, the company that grew out of the blog, has belonged since 2016 to Literally Media, which also owns Know Your Meme, and in 2019 a sculpture based on one of the best-known lolcats joined the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection.
Sources
- Lolcat (Wikipedia)
- Creating a cute cat frenzy (Time, 2007)
- Behind the meme: I Can Has Cheezburger? (Wired, 2008)
- The LOLcat Bible (Los Angeles Times, 2007)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.