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I’m not sure if this is true for anyone else, but there’s one member of my household often referred to as the snuggliest killer I know. Under normal circumstances, that’d (hopefully) be a contradiction in terms, unless the household member happened to be a cat. In the same spirit, today’s object of investigation happens to be one of the grouchiest sources of joy ever to grace the internet.
Cat photos are basically the quintessential internet show and tell, so when on September 23, 2012, the first-ever photos of Tardar Sauce, aka Grumpy Cat, were posted to Reddit and Imgur, it was the next in a long line of so-called LOLCat image macros.
Titled “Grumpy” in reference to a string of previous “blank cat” memes, Tardar Sauce only looks grumpy for medical reasons. It later came out that her signature resting grumpy face is a product of her feline dwarfism, and underbite.
The dramatic popularity of the Grumpy Cat meme
But nobody could have expected how dramatically fast her popularity was about to take off. Within two days of the original posts, the debut Imgur submission reached over a million views, and YouTube clips were posted simultaneously to a channel that today is verified and has 275,000 subscribers.
Tardar Sauce’s debut was quickly picked up by news outlets like BuzzFeed, and within days there were hundreds of image macros created by fans, using her original photo. People could not get enough Grumpy Cat, and pretty soon she was everywhere.
Grumpy Cat’s owner, Tabatha Bundesen, was quick to capitalize on Tardar Sauce’s newfound fame. Within days, her official T-shirt line opened via Clothes That Kill, and she also opened an online store, where fans can buy Grumpy Cat merch in every variation—that is, if they don’t find it in a physical retail outlet.
Tardar Sauce has been turned into her own MGM logo variant, riffed on in the grumpy grandma meme, appeared on daytime talk shows, gotten a lifetime original movie starring Aubrey Plaza, got her own wax statue at Madame Tussauds, a marketing deal with Friskies, and even got a nod by President Obama during a 2015 speech.
In May of 2019, at the age of seven, Grumpy Cat tragically died of a urinary tract infection. This prompted an outpouring of love and sympathy, not dissimilar to when Kabosu aka Doge died.
It incited the creation of a viral hashtag #TweetAGrumpyFaceForGrumpyCat, which was championed by all the feline kindred spirits of the internet.
The legacy of Grumpy Cat is that it’s one of these “perfect place at the perfect time” stories. If the memeverse is somewhere people often vent their daily annoyances into the void, then Grumpy Cat was a grumpy-looking cat, in an internet filled with grumpy cat lovers.
If cats fits, they sits. Tardar Sauce appears to have seen a comfy, cozy, unoccupied place in all of our hearts, and snuggled right in.
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