Happy Cat

A photograph of a wide-mouthed, apparently delighted grey British Shorthair began circulating on internet message boards in the early 2000s. Nobody has ever conclusively established who took it or who the cat was — the most-repeated account traces it to a Russian cat food advertisement, but the trail is thin and the image had already been copied thousands of times before anyone thought to ask. The cat became known simply as Happy Cat.

In January 2007 a blogger named Eric Nakagawa posted the picture with a caption in deliberately broken English: "I Can Has Cheezburger?" The site he set up around it became one of the defining destinations of the early social web, drawing millions of visitors a day at its peak and turning a single grinning cat into the founding text of an entire genre.

That genre — LOLcats — had a grammar of its own. Images of cats were captioned in a mangled dialect that acquired the half-serious name "lolspeak", with its own conventions of misspelling, syntax and idiom that regulars policed with surprising rigour. Linguists took an interest. Academic papers were written about it. For a few years around 2007 to 2010, it was one of the most recognisable things on the internet, and a Bible translation into lolspeak was completed by a crowdsourced volunteer project.

What makes Happy Cat historically significant rather than merely popular is what came afterwards. The Cheezburger network established the template that essentially every meme site since has followed: user-submitted images, simple caption tools, ranking and remixing. It demonstrated that internet humour could be a participatory format rather than a broadcast one, and it did so several years before the mainstream platforms arrived to industrialise the idea.

The cat itself remains anonymous. Grumpy Cat had a name, an owner and a management company; Happy Cat came from an era when an image simply escaped into the world and belonged to everybody. That anonymity is now part of the appeal — the founding face of internet cat culture is a cat nobody can identify.