Grumpy Cat

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · Reddit · Also known as Tardar Sauce; Grumpy Cat Limited

What it is

Grumpy Cat was the nickname of Tardar Sauce, a small pet cat from Arizona whose face looked permanently fed up. An underbite and a form of dwarfism turned the corners of her mouth down, though her owners said she was a normal, calm cat most of the time. People copied her photo and added short, bleak captions in big white capital letters, as if she were saying them. She became one of the most recognised animals of the 2010s, and was then sold as a brand.

Where it came from

On 22 September 2012, Bryan Bundesen posted photos of his sister Tabatha's cat to Reddit, a website where users share pictures and links and vote the best ones up. The scowl made the post climb fast, and other users started making captioned versions within days. The pictures spread to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and image sites. By early 2013 she had a manager, Ben Lashes, who also represented Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, and she was being flown to the SXSW festival in Texas and booked on American breakfast television.

How people used it

The usual format was a photo of her face with a short, gloomy line at the top and a punchline at the bottom, in the white block lettering that most joke pictures used at the time. The lines were refusals, insults and put-downs of anything cheerful, often a single word: "No." People posted them as replies when someone was too keen or asked for a favour. Fans also bought the official goods: T-shirts, mugs, plush toys, calendars, a best-selling book, a phone game and Friskies cat food, which made her its "Official Spokescat" in 2013. In 2014 she starred in a Lifetime Christmas film, voiced by Aubrey Plaza.

Why it mattered

She gave people a face for a mood almost everyone has: being tired of being told to cheer up. Saying no through a cat was easier and funnier than saying it yourself. She also mattered as a business. Her owner took leave from her job to manage the cat's schedule, the company held trademarks, and in 2018 it won $710,000 in damages from a coffee firm that used her face on products beyond its licence. When she died in May 2019, aged seven, news outlets reported it and fans posted tributes, which shows how attached people had become to a cat they'd only seen in photos.

The jokes around it

• "I had fun once. It was awful."
• "No." on its own, in huge letters, as the whole joke.
• "Good." captioned under her face, posted in reply to bad news.
• Grumppuccino, the iced coffee sold with her face on the bottle, later the subject of the lawsuit.
• Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, the 2014 Lifetime film title.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People were happy to pin their own bad moods on a stranger's pet, and once millions did, the pet's face became a product. The jump from one Reddit post to a Friskies contract took about a year, which shows how quickly attention online could be turned into money.

What noah is not sure of

Some accounts say a video of her went up on YouTube around the same day as the Reddit post, so Reddit may not be the only starting point. Aubrey Plaza voicing her in the Lifetime film is from memory rather than the source text.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.