When you're feeling down what do you do? Does seeing your cat licking the floor or chasing his own tail make everything right again? Now you can have this experience anywhere, anytime, faster than you can say I can has cheezburger. It's the unending world of cat cuteness where if the last one didn't make you LOL there's always a next button. Where the font is always bold, the spelling iz unchecked, and the grammar is adorably wrong. All these qualities synthesize to create what may be the purest form of one-liner comedy. LOLcats and its many imitators use candid still shots of cats paired with a caption that imposes a human sense of humor and desires onto the (oblivious) kitty.LOLCATS best-of (and they're all best btw) compilation video here. A lot of people complained that the frames changed too quickly, but I think this was a great conceptual move on the creator's part. The frames started out slow and towards the end went by so fast, you barely have time to finish reading. If you actually need more time to read everything, you have to keep pausing the video. The point being that this brand of humor is highly edible and addictive. And millions love it.
After you watch several dozen, the LOLcats slang grows on you. Words that you never knew existed suddenly seem so right: caturday, harbls, meh, eated, etc. And the random pluralization of anything makes it funnier. This suddenly reminded me of another kind of less savory humor, which made me feel a little bad for loving LOLcats. The kinds of ads that infantilized African-American characters/spokespeople in the early 20th century used the exact same comedy tactics. Are we creating glaringly inappropriate stereotypes of cats? Is LOLcats racist? Probably not. Sometimes a cheezburger is just a cheezburger.