u can has sens of humer?
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
The LOLCat phenomenon made it into the Chicago Tribune today, and columnist Steve Johnson has got a problem. And that means I have got a problem with Steve Johnson!
There are things to praise about “lolcats,” the Internet phenomenon that sees people decorate pictures of cats with cutesy phrases and then post them to public Web sites, digital mini-posters advertising the animals’ imagined innermost thoughts.
Oh, don’t hold back, Steve. Tell us how you really feel.
And it does not seem likely to do any real harm, this deliberately kitsch anthropomorphizing of wittle kittie-witties.
…wait for it…
But beyond that, come on, people. Don’t you see that you are creating — and exalting — the Precious Moments figurines of Internet culture?
Them’s fightin’ words, sir!
Coming across these things on the Net, as the trend refuses to fade away, it feels as if all my friends had decided to go on and on about how funny it is that Garfield is always trying to score some lasagna.
[...]
Cats, it seems, always spell “your” with just the last two letters. It’s because they have tiny brains and little or no formal education.
And here’s the thing about the phrase “LOL,” from which the name for this genre derives. Just typing it doesn’t make it true. In fact, it’s a pretty reliable identifier of exactly the opposite. NELI: Not even laughing on the inside.
So, wait, does that mean “NELI” means that you’re totally cracking up at your desk but you don’t want anyone else to know about it because that would ruin your whole “I’m a mature adult and I think LOLCats are boring and cutesy and juvenile” thing?
Come on, really. If you don’t laugh out loud at this:
then maybe you should ask your mom if the mailman had pointy ears.
Tags: Kittehs, Memes, News, The Interweb
4 Responses to “u can has sens of humer?”
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Hi, Crabby!
Maybe Steve can do what some of his smarter colleagues have done and write about web trends in a “hey check this out” kind of way instead of a “damn kids! get off my lawn!” kind of way.
I agree with you about the dark creepy kittehs — those are some of my favorites.
And I LOL at them too, and I’ve been reading ICanHasCheezburger for months. -
quito says:
September 13th, 2007 at 1:08 pmWow, Crabby nailed it!
One of my student has for her screen saver a collection of these kind of cat photos, plus photos of her with her own cat (she has a few that really capture the quiet curiousity that cats and humans can share with each other). It’s very distracting when we’re working together.
My guess is Steve didn’t have anything intelligent to write about and someone in his family was looking at one of these, so he felt inspiration. He could’ve just as easy written a diatribe against, oh, FaceBook.
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September 12th, 2007 at 6:15 am
So I’m relatively new to lolcats and my exposure is somewhat sporadic–so maybe that’s why I do often literally Laugh Out Loud when I see them.
And I’m so NOT a Garfield kind o’ gal.
I think the thing that makes them so funny is that there’s a nice dark creepy side to a lot of them–they’re Cute, but words often play off that it some way. (And okay, some of them are just straight out cute).
Perhaps poor Steve doesn’t have a cat. Because these things sort of capture an essential truth about cats–they’re pretty smart, but not nearly as smart as they think they are.
I think there are a lot of newspaper columnists who are just plain jealous of the web and find many things irritating because they can’t understand their own declining popularity as people find fresher funnier voices out there.