Crying Cat Memes
Crying cat memes are photographs of cats with large glassy tear-filled eyes, usually edited on rather than real, captioned so the exaggerated distress is obviously fake. The tears are the point: they mark the sadness as performed, not sincere.
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The crying cat meme collection
Every tile opens in the editor. The set is deliberately narrow: visible tears and nothing else. For general cat humour see the cat meme collection, and for flat, dry, tearless dejection see sad cat memes. No frame appears on more than one of the three pages.
Which one to use
These frames are not interchangeable, and the difference between them is not how sad they look — it is who the sadness is aimed at. Some are self-directed, some comment on somebody else, and the register shifts sharply between them. Choosing wrongly is how a joke turns into an accusation.
| Situation | Format to use | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Fake-crying about something completely trivial | Crying Cat | The default. Keep the caption small and the grievance smaller — the gap between the size of the tears and the size of the problem is the joke. |
| The complaint is really aimed at yourself | Crying Cat Thumbs Up | Tears and approval in one frame, which reads as sarcastic acceptance. The only frame here that agrees and complains at once. |
| A sincere feeling you want to admit but undercut | Crying Cat Holding Dog | The second animal makes it affectionate, so it survives being read as genuine, which the solo crying frames do not. |
| A reply image that needs no context | Crying Cat Close Up | The face fills the frame, so it works at thumbnail size with a two-word caption or none at all. |
| Something ominous has just happened | Oh No Black Cat | Dread rather than grief. The darker frame shifts the register from performed sadness to actual bad news. |
| Losing an argument or a game in public | Crying Michael Jordan | Long established as the face of a public loss, so it needs no explanation. The strongest single-line option here. |
| A dramatic personal setback | Crying Peter Parker | Cinematic and overwrought. The melodrama is the joke, so keep the caption understated to contrast with it. |
| The same, but quieter | Peter Parker Cry | A more restrained frame for when full melodrama would outsize the complaint. |
| Someone strong falling apart | Crying Hulk | The contrast between the body and the tears carries it. Wasted on any caption where strength is not part of the premise. |
| Public embarrassment rather than sadness | Crying Boy On A Bench | Reads as exposed rather than merely upset, a different and more specific feeling than the cat frames offer. |
| Crying over something you are making | Girl Crying While Drawing | Specific to creative work. The natural frame for art, coursework and code jokes, and odd anywhere else. |
| Comparing a weak reaction with a confident one | Crying Wojak vs Chad | Two panels, so the caption must be a genuine comparison. A single line wastes half the image. |
| Hiding a real feeling behind a public face | Pretending To Be Happy Hiding Crying Behind A Mask | Layered, so it needs a caption naming both layers. The only frame here that holds two contradictory statements at once. |
One structural note. The crying cat works as an overlay as well as a template: people composite the eyes onto an unrelated photograph rather than captioning the cat. If your idea needs a specific background, that route often beats any fixed frame here.
Captions that work
Ten captions built for performed distress, with the boxes separated. Notice how small the grievances are: the format collapses if the thing being cried about is genuinely serious, because then the tears stop being a joke.
- when the free trial ends and the subscription starts nine ninety nine a month
- me watching the film i chose, that i was warned about the warning
- the last slice was in the fridge was
- when a friend finishes the series without me we had an agreement
- me promising i will not cry at the ending the ending
- i am completely fine with the result the tears are allergies
- when the code works and i do not know why same tears, different reason
- when someone remembers a small thing i mentioned once no notes
- me at the gate watching the group before mine board group four
- when the song i played all year hits number one we did this
Where crying cat memes come from
The honest position first: we could not verify a sourced origin for the crying cat. There is no Wikipedia article on it, and the primary meme-documentation sites were unreachable from this environment. The commonly repeated account — that the teary-eyed edits began on a specific European social media page in the mid-2010s and spread as a photoshop practice — is plausible and widely stated, but we have not confirmed it against a source, so this page does not assert it and gives no date.
What is documented is the context, and it explains why the format took hold. Cats have dominated internet humour since the image-macro era began: pictures circulated on 4chan on Saturdays from around 2005, I Can Has Cheezburger was established on 11 January 2007, and by 2015 YouTube held over two million cat videos averaging around twelve thousand views each, higher than any other category.
The second verifiable thing is biological, and it matters for reading these images correctly. Cats produce tears for lubrication and in response to irritation or illness, but they do not weep from emotion the way the frames depict. Every crying cat in this collection is therefore an edit. That is not a technicality — it is why the format reads as ironic by default. The audience knows the tears are fake because they know cats do not do this, and that shared knowledge licenses the joke.
The non-cat frames arrived by usage rather than design: Crying Michael Jordan from a photograph of a real athlete, the Peter Parker frames from a superhero film, the wojaks from the long-running set of crudely drawn reaction figures. They sit alongside the crying cat because posters reach for whichever tearful face fits the beat.
Limits and etiquette
The specific danger here is that fake tears aimed at a real person read as an accusation of overreacting. Posting a crying cat under someone who is genuinely upset is not a neutral joke; it is a way of calling them dramatic without typing the word. The frame is safe when the target is yourself or a situation, and it turns hostile fast when the target is a person.
The format is also heavily over-used, so a plain crying cat with a plain caption is close to invisible now. If you want it to register, the caption has to carry the joke by itself.
Several frames contain identifiable real people, including an athlete at an emotional public moment. Reaction images made from real distress are normal online, but they are still somebody actual bad day.
These are third-party images hosted here so they can be captioned. If one is yours and you want it removed, the DMCA page handles it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the crying cat meme actually made of?
Almost always an edit rather than a photograph of a genuinely crying animal. The look comes from large glassy tear-filled eyes composited onto an ordinary cat photo, which is why the same eyes turn up on dozens of unrelated cats. Cats do not shed emotional tears, so any frame that looks like this has been altered.
Why do people paste the crying face onto other pictures?
Because the tears work as a tone marker rather than as an emotion. Adding them to any image tells the reader that the sadness in the caption is performed and should not be taken at face value. That is why the overlay spread as a practice rather than as one fixed template.
Which crying frame should I pick for a sarcastic post?
Crying Cat Thumbs Up. The gesture and the tears contradict each other inside a single image, so the sarcasm is built in before you write anything. The plain crying frames can be read as sincere if the caption is ambiguous, and this one cannot.
Is the crying cat the same as the sad cat meme?
In search behaviour the two overlap heavily, but on this site they are kept apart deliberately. This collection covers visible tears and performed distress. The sad cat collection, linked at the top of this page, covers the flat and tearless dejected frames, which carry a different mood and want different captions.
Can the crying cat read as mocking someone?
Yes, and this is the main way it goes wrong. Posted as a reply to a person who is genuinely upset, exaggerated fake tears read as an accusation that they are overreacting. The frame is safe pointed at yourself and risky pointed at anyone else.
Do the crying frames work without any caption?
Crying Cat Close Up and Crying Michael Jordan do, because each is already legible as a single unit of meaning. The two-panel frames such as Crying Wojak vs Chad and the mask frame do not, since half the image stays unexplained without labels.
Which non cat frames belong in a crying set?
The ones people actually cut against the crying cat in the same thread: the two Peter Parker frames, Crying Michael Jordan, Crying Hulk and the bench frame. They share the tears and the performed register, so a caption written for one usually transfers to another.