Cat Memes
Cat memes are image macros built on a small, stable cast of photographed cats — Grumpy Cat, Smudge, Ceiling Cat, the Cheezburger shorthair — captioned to stand in for a human reaction the poster does not want to state directly.
Make your own cat meme
Drag any line on the image to move it.
The cat meme collection
Every tile loads straight into the editor. The set is curated rather than exhaustive: duplicate crops of the same photograph have been dropped, and anything whose joke is tears has been moved to crying cat memes or sad cat memes. No frame appears on more than one of the three pages.
Which one to use
The mistake with a cat collection is treating it as sixteen interchangeable pictures. These frames encode different attitudes — refusal, smugness, observation, confident wrongness — and the wrong one makes a good caption land flat.
| Situation | Format to use | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Someone is arguing at you and you want the last word | Woman Yelling At Cat | Their accusation left, a blank unbothered cat right. The asymmetry is the punchline, so neither caption has to be clever. |
| That comparison but with your own second image | Angry Lady Cat | The single-panel crop of the same screenshot. Pair it with anything instead of being stuck with the cat. |
| Refusing an invitation without sounding rude | Grumpy Cat | The underbite reads as a flat no before you type anything. One short line is enough. |
| Maximum recognition from the shortest caption | Smudge The Cat | A cat recoiling from a salad plate reads as refusal to almost anyone, name known or not. |
| Reacting to something mildly appalling | Cat Looks Inside | Label the container on top, reveal the contents underneath. It fails if you squeeze a whole joke into one box. |
| A setup that genuinely needs two full lines | I Should Buy A Boat Cat | A real advice-animal frame with room top and bottom. Use it when the joke has a premise, not just a reaction. |
| A dry office or process joke | Business Cat | The tie and desk carry the workplace, so the caption can go straight to the absurd policy. |
| A science, maths or nerd pun | Chemistry Cat | The lab coat pre-warns that a pun is coming, which is why a weak pun still lands here. |
| Advice that is confidently wrong | Bad Advice Cat | Distinct from the boat cat: this one is meant to be trusted first and disastrous second. |
| Watching a mess unfold from a safe distance | Ceiling Cat | A cat peering through a hole means observer. Your caption only has to name the mess. |
| A joke about the old internet itself | I Can Has Cheezburger Cat | Deliberately dated. Used sincerely it reads as someone who stopped posting in 2009. |
| Something went straight over someone head | Woosh Cat | Built for the missed-joke reply. It is a rebuttal frame, not a standalone post. |
| A smug, well-informed take | Cat Newspaper | The prop does the smugness, so your caption can be a plain statement and still read as arch. |
| Announcing that you are leaving the conversation | Cool Cat Stroll | There is movement in the frame, which no static reaction cat can give you. |
| An absurd cursed crossover | Shrek Cat | Pure visual nonsense. It works when the caption is deadpan and refuses to acknowledge the image. |
| Something genuinely wholesome with no bite | Cute Cat | The only frame here with no built-in sarcasm. Everything else undercuts a sincere message. |
Two rules cut across the table. A cat looking into the lens is a reaction frame and wants a short caption; a cat doing something can carry a longer setup. And the two-panel frames need a real relationship between the halves.
Captions that work
Written for the frames above, with the two boxes separated. Swap the nouns for your own situation: the structure transfers, the specifics do not.
- my landlord asking why the rent is late the version of me that pays in vibes
- the group chat planning a trip six months out the group chat on the day
- what i told my manager i would finish today what i actually did
- people who insist cats are unfriendly the cat, currently on my keyboard
- me explaining a show nobody asked about everyone at the table
- my browser with forty tabs open me hunting the one playing music
- leaving a party without saying goodbye the correct amount of goodbye
- the vet saying he is a little overweight him, personally offended
- me at 3pm deciding today is productive the sun, setting
- every recipe blog before the recipe the recipe
Where cat memes come from
Captioned cat pictures are older than the internet. Harry Pointer, a nineteenth-century Brighton photographer, is credited as the progenitor of the posed comic cat photograph, and Thomas Edison filmed Boxing Cats in 1894. The first video uploaded to YouTube, by co-founder Steve Chen on 22 May 2005, was of his cat.
The modern image macro dates to the mid-2000s. Cat pictures were posted on 4chan on Saturdays, or Caturdays, from around 2005. I Can Has Cheezburger was established on 11 January 2007 by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, hit roughly 1.5 million daily hits at its peak and was covered by Time in July 2007. That site fixed the deliberately broken grammar and the Impact caption as a house style, and it is where Ceiling Cat entered the vocabulary.
The celebrity-cat era followed. Nyan Cat was uploaded in April 2011 and became the fifth most-viewed YouTube video of that year, and Lil Bub appeared on Tumblr in November 2011. Grumpy Cat, whose real name was Tardar Sauce, was born on 4 April 2012 in Morristown, Arizona; a photograph posted to Reddit by Bryan Bundesen on 22 September 2012 made her the most commercially successful cat meme ever made. She was owned by Tabatha Bundesen and died on 14 May 2019, aged seven.
The newest frame here is the two-panel one. Woman Yelling At Cat fuses a 5 December 2011 screenshot from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episode Malibu Beach Party From Hell, showing Taylor Armstrong mid-argument, with a photograph of Smudge, a cat from Ottawa owned by Miranda Stillabower, uploaded to Tumblr in June 2018. A Twitter user combined them on 1 May 2019, and a Reddit post on 2 June applied the format to sports fandom and sent it vertical.
Limits and etiquette
Cat memes are the most saturated animal category online. An unmodified Grumpy Cat or Ceiling Cat post reads as nostalgic rather than funny to a younger audience; if you want it to land, the age of the format has to be part of the joke.
Two frames here come with a real person attached. Woman Yelling At Cat and its single-panel crop are built on footage of a genuine argument involving a woman who has since spoken publicly about her work with domestic violence shelters. Aiming it at a real person in a real dispute is a different act from using it about football. Smudge and Tardar Sauce were somebody actual pet, photographed by an owner who never sought a decade of reuse.
The frames on this page are third-party images hosted here so they can be captioned. If one is yours and you want it removed, use the DMCA page.
Frequently asked questions
Which cat meme template is the most recognisable?
Woman Yelling At Cat, by a wide margin. It pairs a screenshot from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episode Malibu Beach Party From Hell, which aired on 5 December 2011, with a photo of a cat named Smudge posted to Tumblr in June 2018. The two were first placed side by side on Twitter on 1 May 2019.
Are cat memes still worth posting?
Yes, though the older advice-animal frames now read as retro. Woman Yelling At Cat, Smudge and Cat Looks Inside still circulate normally. Ceiling Cat and I Can Has Cheezburger work mainly as jokes about the era they came from rather than as live formats.
Can I use a photo of my own cat instead?
You can, and for anything personal it is the better choice. These frames get reused for recognition, not quality. If your joke depends on the reader instantly reading the expression, a known frame does more work than a better photo of an unknown cat.
Why do so many cat memes use white Impact text?
Impact with a black outline came out of the image-macro era of the 2000s, when it was the most legible way to lay text over a photo at small sizes, and it stuck as a genre signal. On the older frames here it is close to mandatory; on Cat Looks Inside or Smudge it looks dated.
Do cat memes need two text boxes or one?
That depends on the frame, not on taste. Advice-animal cats such as I Should Buy A Boat Cat, Chemistry Cat and Bad Advice Cat are built for a setup line and a payoff line. Single reaction cats such as Grumpy Cat and Smudge are stronger with one short line or none at all.
Which cat frames work for a work or office joke?
Business Cat carries the setting in the image, so it needs the least explanation. Cat Newspaper suits a smug take on a company decision, and Bad Advice Cat fits anything about guidance that turned out to be wrong.
Where do the crying and sad cat formats fit?
They are deliberately absent from this collection. The teary photoshopped cats live in the crying cat set and the flat tearless dejected frames live in the sad cat set, both linked above. Keeping them apart stops one very large mood from swallowing the whole cat category.