I wouldn't have made this connection myself, except as an excuse to post amusing images, but
this scientific article on the way the human eye is genetically predisposed to track animals in motion, more than other objects in motion,
leads nicely to a digression into LOLcats. As the tech blogger says:
What's great about this research is that it inadvertently targeted exactly what's happening in lolcat images: the animal has been changed from being just a regular cute kitty, to being a cute kitty with special attributes created by the caption. So a lolcat is an animal image with "a single change."
Perhaps, but it doesn't address the "why cats?" question. The
leading lolcats site has been branching out into non-felines, with their semi-daily, "Daily Bonuf Lol," with shots that usually feature small rodents, instead of/in addition to cats, but the site is still predominantly cats. Dogs and guinea pigs and other creatures make semi-regular appearances, but they're usually
just costars, unable to command the screen for long on their own. Dogs, for all their popularity, are much less often featured, especially on their own.
IMHO, it's pretty simple. Cats are more interesting, to LOL. There was an old
The Far Side cartoon (that I can't find online) which summed this up perfectly. It was called something like, "The Moods of a Golden Retriever" and featured the exact same image of a dog's head in 6 or 8 panels with captions like "happy," "angry," "confused," "pensive," and so forth. That's the problem with loldogs. They don't have expressions, so they can't so easily be anthropomorphized. Like young blonde actresses, they have the ability to look happy and confused, and might manage a mildly-annoyed, if wet and/or cold. Cats, on the other hand,have much more expressive faces that clever lolcaptioners can project countless emotions onto. It also helps that cats are smaller and more curious, so they're constantly getting into things and posing in amusing locations. Plus when they open their mouths they look cute, not like they're about to turn your years of touch typing into
an unpleasant memory.
Of course the cats aren't actually experiencing that much wider an array of emotions, they just look like they are, which is all that really matters for the photo captions. Probably half of the cats in the pictures are just yawning, but with the right timing and a suggestive caption, a mere expression of fatigue, which every cat makes about 500 times a day, can appear to be
superspeed, or
snarkasm, or
taunting laughter, or
yodeling, or even...
fighter pilots?
It also doesn't hurt that cats are so gifted at looking distressed, peeved, or vexed, since a desperate or resigned sense of annoyance is generally comic gold.
moar funny picturesLabels: lolcats
