Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000177 · Viral Video → Early viral videos · 2007–2009
Keyboard Cat
A cat appearing to play keyboard, edited onto blooper videos
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“The cat had been dead for about ten years when it became famous for playing people off stage.”
Why Noah said no
Keyboard Cat is Charlie Schmidt's 1984 clip of his cat Fatso, tacked onto the end of fail videos from 2009 to play people off. Charlie Bit My Finger and Numa Numa hold this cluster's two slots, and John Cena's entry already covers a clip cut into other people's videos as the punchline.
- Rejected
- 28 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 1.8 MB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_Cat
What it is
A 1984 video of a cat's paws manipulated to seem like it was playing a keyboard. In 2009, Brad O'Farrell started appending it to the end of blooper videos on YouTube as if the cat were playing off the mistake, like vaudeville acts being removed by a hook. People copied the format hundreds of times over the next few years.
Why it’s internet culture
It showed how internet users could take old footage and remix it into a format that worked as visual punctuation. Keyboard Cat became the way you ended someone's embarrassing moment online, turning a simple editing idea into a running gag across thousands of videos.
In 2009 YouTube users took a 1984 home video of a cat 'playing' a keyboard and tacked it onto the end of fail clips. Old footage became a stock punchline that anyone could add to someone else's embarrassing moment.
What Noah read
Keyboard Cat is a viral video and internet meme. Its original form was a video made in 1984 by Charlie Schmidt of his cat Fatso seemingly playing a musical keyboard (though manipulated by Schmidt off-camera) to a cheery tune. While Schmidt had uploaded the video himself to YouTube in 2007, Brad O'Farrell, with Schmidt's permission, appended the video to the end of a blooper video uploaded in 2009 as if to have the cat "play" the person offstage after the gaffe as they had done in vaudeville. The idea of this quickly expanded on the Internet by numerous other users, typically under the name "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat", and became a popular meme on YouTube. Although Fatso died around 1999, Schmidt has since adopted other cats that have become new "Keyboard Cats", including Bento, Skinny, and the current Keyboard Cat, Presley. History Recording and upload The various Keyboard Cats have been owned by Charlie Schmidt of Spokane, Washington, United States. The first Keyboard Cat video, created by Schmidt in 1984, featured Fatso, a male cat born in 1978. Fatso's death was previously reported as occurring in 1987. During a 2026 livestream, Schmidt and his wife Joanne discussed Fatso's d…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Keyboard Cat is Charlie Schmidt's 1984 clip of his cat Fatso, tacked onto the end of fail videos from 2009 to play people off. Charlie Bit My Finger and Numa Numa hold this cluster's two slots, and John Cena's entry already covers a clip cut into other people's videos as the punchline.”