Serious Cat (original) (raw)
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About
Serious Cat is an image macro and exploitable LOLcat meme based on a photo of a white cat with a serious expression photoshopped onto its face. The unedited image of the cat was posted to gazo-box.com in November 2003. The earliest known version of the Photoshop was posted to Humor University in 2005. The meme became increasingly popular over the following years, including as the subject of photoshops in which the cat's face is edited over a variety of subjects.
Origin
On November 4th, 2003, an image of a cat with a serious expression on its face was posted to gazo-box.com, which was archived on the Wayback Machine.[1] The post went undiscovered online for around 22 years before it was found by Redditor u/randomguy9I and shared on the /r/LostMedia[2] subreddit on April 21st, 2025, garnering over 2,000 upvotes in two days.
The original Photoshop of the cat image was purportedly posted in early 2005 to the Korean website Humor University,[3] paired with a picture of celebrity DJ / rapper Jae Young[4] to compare the two subjects' looks. Humor University users dubbed the cat "Jae-Young Cat"[5] and spread the image across the Korean web, to websites including DCInside[6], RuliWeb[7] and Today Humor.[8]
Later that year, Jae Young Cat and one of its derivative images were featured as the most reblogged images on Naver.com,[9] a portal search engine site.
Spread
In August 2006, the meme purportedly started appearing on 4chan and YTMND spawning a series of image macros and derivatives that became known as *Serious Cat." An image macro featuring the caption "I are serious cat. This is serious thread," spread across various LOLcat blogs, media aggregators and social networking sites including ICHC[10], Digg[11] and Facebook[12].
On November 5th, 2007, a single serving site called SeriousCat.com[13] was launched.
According to the Urban Dictionary[14] entry submitted on September 17th, 2009, the macro was also popularized on Internet Movie Database[15] by user Timmys_DownTheBloodyWell, although this is unconfirmed. The post reads:
A very fucking serious white cat popularized by imdb.com user Timmys_DownTheBloodyWell. He is Emperor and Supreme overlord of a board called "The Sandbox" as well as President of the Anti-squirrel coalition.
Various Examples
