Mick Lagi Accidental Creator Of The Catjam And Vibing Cat Meme Explains How His Friends Cat Minette Wound Up As One Of 2020s Biggest Memes
PublishedNov 19, 2020 at 06:48PM ESTbyZach.
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ack in April, Mick Lagi shared a seemingly random video of his friends cat, named Minette, to his TikTok as only his second-ever post on the platform. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Minette would become one of the biggest memes of the year in a matter of months, joining the ranks of other famous internet cats like Smudge and Grumpy Cat. By the summer, Lagis initial clip of Minette became solidified as the CatJAMTwitch emote on over 12,600 channels, including notable streamers such as xQc and Tyler1, who propelled it into the mainstream. It continued evolving into the Vibing Cat meme and, finally, the Cat Vibing to Street Musician’s Ievan Polkka meme, spreading to nearly every corner of the web as it became a viral sensation. We reached out to Lagi to find out more about Minette herself and how the original video was created.
Q: Hey there, Mick. Thanks for joining us. Id like to begin by catching up on how lifes going, and what youve been up to with Minette these days. Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers?
A: The cat belongs to a close friend of mine whom I see frequently. Kevin Tardif is the owner of the cat, but unfortunately, he had to give Minette away to another home because his son started to develop allergies. Luckily, I had time to do some videos with her before that.
A: Yes, I did see the video, and I laughed a lot. This version is too good!
Where Did The House Cat Meme Come From
Your computer is literally haunted
Validated User
Monkey King said:The gist of it is that, on a successful hit, any damaging attack deals a minimum of 1 HP damage. Average commoners have 4 HP, an attack bonus of 0, and an armor class of 10. A cat has 2 HP, but a total attack bonus of +4, AC 14, and gets three attacks as a full round action.In other words, by the Rules As Written, commoners face mortal peril from a common house cat. If pussy gets him backed into a corner, John Q. Farmer is screwed. It’s even worse if the commoner is an elf, since then he only gets 3 HP. Death in one round from a cat is, to say the least, embarassing.It’s one of those silly rules glitches that stems from the fact that D& D doesn’t scale down to everyman level too well. Also because animals in 3e D& D are stupidly statted.
Smudge Is A Cat That Became Famous Thanks To This Meme
Smudge the cat meme started making rounds back in May when a Twitter user MISSINGEGIRL put out a tweet combining Smudges image with that of Taylor Armstrong from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The caption of the tweet read These photos together is making me lose it and accumulated an impressive amount of 78,900 retweets and 276,800 likes in two months.
Bored Panda has reached out to Smudges owner, a 24-year-old sculptor Miranda for more details about the cute cat and she shared plenty of pawsome facts about the meme-lord! Like the fact that hes around 6 years old. I didnt get him as a kitten so I dont know his exact age, the owner revealed.
Smudge is a super shy, but very loving kitty once he gets to know you! Miranda explained. She also added that the cat has a knack for following her around the house every time shes at home. I cant go anywhere without him being right there, she said.
Seeing how pictures of Smudge are spreading all over the internet, the kittys owners decided to create an Instagram page dedicated to him in late May. This is where all the lovely photos of Smudge come from and the gallery shows the felines true colors.
A lot of the comments come from other countries as well, hes known worldwide now! Miranda expressed her joy at how popular and beloved her chonky cat is. She tries to update his page daily so that every one who adores Smudge could get their fix.
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Where Did The Meme Come From
Although its exact origins are uncertain, the meme became popular a few years ago as a way for people of colour, particularly black Americans, to satirise the class-based and racially charged hostility they often face.
Over the last decade, as it became easier to film confrontations on our smartphones, incidents started to be captured on camera and uploaded to social media with far greater ease – a woman calling the police when a black eight-year-old child was selling water without a permit, for example.
When these videos inevitably went viral, people online would assign the perpetrators commonplace names that chimed with the situation.
The woman who complained about the young water-seller was dubbed “Permit Patty”. Another woman who called the police when a black family was having a barbecue was named “BBQ Becky“. And a white woman who called 911 on a black dad at a football match, while sitting in a golf cart, was called “Golfcart Gail”.
This trend properly broke through in 2018, and eventually all of these names became distilled into one or two of the most popular – including Karen.
It also became synonymous with a particular type of hairstyle – specifically, the short, choppy cut sported by US reality TV personality Kate Gosselin in 2010.
How Have Memes Affected Society
Internet memes have been shown to wield immense cultural and social power due to their ubiquity. For example, the successful Dogecoin cryptocurrency was originally created as a joke based on the Doge meme.
meme, unit of cultural information spread by imitation. The term meme was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to selfish genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends. Understood in those terms, memes carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection, with or without impacts on human fitness . The concept of the meme, however, remains largely theoretical. It is also controversial, given the notion of selfishness and the application of the concept to the evolution of cultures, which formed the basis for the field of memetics.
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How Did The Monday Night Football Cat Get On The Field
Editor, The Checkdown
- Copied!
The meme that took over Monday Night Football isn’t going anywhere. It has nine lives, after all.
But the cat that spawned a million tweets is also spawning a few important questions. Where did it come from? Did someone bring their cat to the Cowboys-Giants game? If so, do cats require a ticket for entry? If not, do packs of feral cats roam the New Jersey swamps surrounding MetLife Stadium?
Giants reporter Madelyn Burke did the hard-nosed journalism others wouldn’t to uncover the origin story of football’s favorite feline.
Asked building security about the black cat on the field: Apparently there are some resident stray cats at MetLifeâ they usually come out after the game, people feed them, etc. They live in the bleachers, Iâm told this one must have gotten startled out by fan noise #journalism
Madelyn Burke
So MetLife Stadium has stray cats — as in more than one. Their seats for every Jets and Giants home game are so good they can leap right out and pause game play.
The Monday Night Football Cat temporarily sidelined both teams, found the end zone, escaped through a tunnel, and promptly broke the Internet. And according to MetLife Stadium, it’s still on the loose somewhere under the bleachers.
Here’s hoping the cat turns itself in soon so it can start writing its Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech.
The story of last night’s cat ð
Where Did The Karen Meme Come From
It’s pretty new to me.
For me, my sister in law. Her cooking could kill someone with a healing factor
I wasnt gonna upvote your comment, because I dont know your sister in law. I dont feel included in the joke. But then I got to the healing factor part. I feel special that I get that reference, and I will reward you because you gave me this opportunity to feel a part of the group.
Oh my gosh, Karen, you cant just ask where the meme came from.
Karen is the stereotypical ‘middle-aged white Midwestern lady’ name, and middle-aged white Midwestern women are generally pretty annoying.
Define this. And you know you used apostrophe’s instead of quotes?
Honestly it’s a couple different things that got blended together.
The Dane Cook skit from a while ago is a big inspiration for a lot of this subs flavor of it.
There another separate meme that got mashed in from someone who was burned hard by his girlfriend Karen, and spawned r/fuck_you_karen
But there’s also people who just hate on “Karen” in their friend group, have no idea where it started, and find it here after.
This probably had the best set of origins:
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Woman Yelling At Cat Memes Flood Internet People Drop Creative Versions
If you are active on social media, theres a very slim chance that you have missed the woman yelling at cat meme which has left many in splits. Though this meme made its Twitter debut a few months back, it refuses to die down. In fact, it resurfaces every now and then just like its doing recently.
The meme is actually a combination of two different pictures. It pairs a scene from a fight from TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with the picture of a cat named Smudge.
Heres a video of the fight from where the image of the yelling woman is taken:
As for Smudge, turns out it is a table cat who hates vegetables or thats what the Instagram profile created for the feline states.
What About Racism And Black Lives Matter
On Memorial Day this year, 25 May, black birder Christian Cooper was walking in Central Park, New York, when he ran into a woman called Amy Cooper , who had let her dog off the lead in a leash-only area of the park.
He asked her to put her dog back on the lead. Her response was to call 911 and, in histrionic tones, tell operators that “there’s an African-American man threatening my life”. The entire exchange was filmed, uploaded to social media, and Ms Cooper was from then on known as “Central Park Karen”.
George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis that same day, just hours after the Central Park incident – meaning people began linking the racism of “Karens” such as Amy Cooper to the wider issue of systemic racism and police brutality.
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Is The Karen Meme Sexist
In April, British feminist Julie Bindel tweeted: “Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?”
This is an argument that has been repeated in recent months, as the meme has become more mainstream. Some people responded to Bindel’s tweet agreeing with her summary. Even British supermarket Sainsbury’s has had a run-in with the meme.
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However, people who use the term “Karen” say that it is not simply a catch-all for all middle-aged white women – and is, rather, dependent on a person’s behaviour.
For example, writer Karen Geier – a Karen in the traditional sense – responded to Bindel: “As the only Karen replying to you: No. If you have a problem being called ‘a Karen’ then don’t be one? I don’t call the police on people or ask to speak to the manager. Very simple!”
How The Woman Yelling At Cat Meme Became A Thing
The first known use of the two images together was a tweet from . The account posted the two images captioned: These photos together is making me lose it. The original meme has 77k retweets and 274k likes.
The woman yelling at cat meme is everywhere now and is used all the time as a reaction meme.
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What Exactly Is A ‘karen’ And Where Did The Meme Come From
Earlier this week Domino’s Pizza had to issue an apology over a promotion it ran in Australia and New Zealand, offering free pizza to “nice Karens”.
The company didn’t pick out the name Karen at random. “Karen” has, in recent years, become a widespread meme referencing a specific type of middle-class white woman, who exhibits behaviours that stem from privilege.
To give some examples, “Karen” is associated with the kind of person who demands to “speak to the manager” in order to belittle service industry workers, is anti-vaccination, and carries out racist micro-aggressions, such as asking to touch black people’s hair.
But a predominant feature of the “Karen” stereotype is that they weaponise their relative privilege against people of colour – for example, when making police complaints against black people for minor or even – in numerous cases – fictitious infringements.
And in recent months, the meme has evolved into something new: Coronavirus Karen. This particular form of Karen refuses to wear a face covering in shops, won’t stick to quarantine, and thinks the whole pandemic thing is overblown.
But as the meme has become increasingly mainstream, some have argued that it’s sexist and ageist.
Grumpy Cat Limited V Grenade Beverage Llc
In May 2013, Grumpy Cat Limited partnered with Grenade Beverage LLC to market “Grumppuccino” iced coffee beverages.
In December 2015, Grumpy Cat Limited filed a lawsuit against Grenade Beverage LLC citing trademark infringement when the beverage company expanded its line of Grumpy Cat coffee offerings beyond what was originally agreed upon, producing and marketing a Grumpy Cat roasted ground coffee even after being told by email that they were not approved to do so.
In January 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California jury sided with Grumpy Cat Limited and ordered Grenade Beverage Company to pay $710,000 in damages for copyright and trademark infringement, as well as a $1 nominal damage fee for breach of contract.
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How Have Memes Evolved Since Then
With the wide use of social media and sites like Reddit, 9GAG, and 4Chan, it has become increasingly easy for memes to gain popularity and go viral overnight, with millions of daily visitors looking to have a lol or two.
Before the internet came along, memes tended to have political or cultural significance, and their popularity lasted much longer than they do today. While some memes today can still show longevity, most go from viral to forgotten in a relatively short time. This is partly due to how fast the internet moves and partly because of how easy it is to create memes.
Memes have also moved away from political or cultural topics to focus more on pop-culture references and sarcastic life observations, making them relatable, funny, and easier for them to spread like wildfire across the web.
One significant case of evolution in a meme would have to be LOLCats and the whole language surrounding the meme itself. LOLCats use a creative style of spelling with their memes, called lolspeak, personifying cats depicted in images. Using spelling mistakes and improper tenses to make sentences in a common structure, where Can I have a cheeseburger? would translate to i can has cheezberger.
Want to learn more about specific memes? Theres no better place to explore than Know Your Memea veritable encyclopedia of all things meme.
The Story Behind Popular ‘woman Yelling At A Cat’ Meme Was Actually The Result Of Abuse
Youve seen the viral meme a split-screen of a blonde-haired woman yelling at a white cat making a face in front of a plate of lettuce. The meme has inspired countless laughs, but the story behind the woman in the meme, Taylor Armstrong, has a very difficult origin.
Dubbed the Woman Yelling at a Cat meme by Know Your Meme, it features Armstrong, a star on the reality TV series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the white cat, Smudge. Originally two separate images, Twitter user @MISSINGEGIRL spliced Armstrong and Smudge together in May, writing, These photos together is making me lose it. The resulting meme and all its hilarious incarnations went viral.
These photos together is making me lose it
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For Armstrong, however, the image of her screaming comes from a 2011 episode in season two of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. During the episode, titled Malibu Beach Party From Hell, Armstrong was telling her friends about her experience with domestic violence and abuse by her late ex-husband. Armstrong also revealed after filing for divorce and speaking out about the alleged abuse, her former husband died by suicide.
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