Woman yelling at a cat

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

Originated 2019 · Twitter, combining a 2011 still from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with a 2018 Tumblr photo · Also known as Woman Yelling at Cat; Lady Yelling at a Cat; Smudge the Cat; Taylor Armstrong and Smudge; Smudgeposting

What it is

It's a single picture made of two photos side by side. On the left, a blonde woman, Taylor Armstrong, is crying, shouting and pointing while another woman holds her back. On the right, a white cat sits at a dinner table behind a plate of salad, looking confused and faintly disgusted. People wrote a caption over each half, so the woman seems to be accusing the cat and the cat seems to answer back. A meme is a picture or phrase people copy and change for their own jokes.

Where it came from

The left photo is a still from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, a reality TV show, from an episode aired in December 2011 in which a beach party ended in a row. Kyle Richards is the woman holding Armstrong back. The right photo was posted on Tumblr, a blogging site, in June 2018 by the owner of Smudge, a cat in Ottawa, with the caption "He no like vegetals". On 1 May 2019 a Twitter user put the two together. A Reddit post in June 2019 mocking fans of the New York Knicks basketball team set off thousands of copies.

How people used it

The format stayed the same. The woman's caption was an angry, emotional accusation, and the cat's caption was a calm, smug or baffling reply. Topics ran from spiders and unanswered text messages to arguments about violence in video games and how to pronounce words. People swapped in other characters, merged it with other memes, rebuilt it in Lego and in the video game The Sims 4, dressed as the pair for Halloween and painted it on a protest sign in Guatemala. Libraries, footballers and brands used it to show they were in on the joke. The expected reply to a good one was to make your own.

Why it mattered

It fitted almost any disagreement, because it gave each side a face: one person losing their temper, the other refusing to take it seriously. Anyone could fill it in with two short lines. Smudge became famous in his own right, with merchandise, an Instagram account of about 1.4 million followers by December 2019 and a fan group for "Smudgeposting". His owners gave T-shirt money to a cat rescue charity. In 2020 the meme won Meme of the Year at the Shorty Awards, a prize for online content, accepted on behalf of both Armstrong and Smudge.

The jokes around it

• "He no like vegetals": the cat's original 2018 Tumblr caption.
• Smudgeposting: posting the cat on his own, glaring at nachos and other food.
• Left caption shouting a complaint, right caption giving a deadpan or petty answer.
• Recasting the woman or the cat with cartoon characters, politicians or other memes.
• Couples dressing as the woman and the cat for Halloween.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People took a photo of a real woman at one of the worst moments of her life, an argument about her late husband who had died by suicide, and made it funny by putting a cat next to it. Most of the people sharing it had never seen the show, and the joke worked partly because they didn't know.

What noah is not sure of

That the 1 May 2019 tweet by @MISSINGEGIRL was the very first pairing comes from Wikipedia and Know Your Meme; earlier, unnoticed versions may exist. Follower and retweet figures are as reported in 2019 and weren't independently checked.

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