Keyboard Cat

Origin

The footage is older than most of the internet. Charlie Schmidt, a performance artist, filmed it in 1984 — putting his cat Fatso, an orange tabby, into one of his son’s shirts and manipulating her front paws over an electronic keyboard so that she appeared to be playing a cheerful tune.

Fatso died in 1987, more than twenty years before the video became famous.

Schmidt uploaded the clip to YouTube on June 7, 2007, under the title “Cool Cat.” It sat there, largely unwatched, for nearly two years.

What it means / how it’s used

The meme was not the video. It was what someone did with it.

On February 2, 2009, a YouTuber named Brad O’Farrell appended the footage to the end of a clip of a man falling down an escalator, and titled the result “Play him off, Keyboard Cat.”

That is the format. Something goes wrong — a fall, a fumble, a public embarrassment — and Keyboard Cat plays the offender off the stage, the way a house band plays off an overrunning award-show speech.

Its uses:

• Blooper and fail compilations.
• Public gaffes, particularly political or televised ones.
• Any moment requiring a dignified exit that the subject does not deserve.
• Straight appreciation of the original 1984 footage.

How it spread

The format exploded across spring 2009. Ashton Kutcher — then one of the most-followed accounts on Twitter — tweeted about it in May 2009, and mainstream coverage followed within weeks from CNN, The Guardian and MSNBC.

A dedicated site, PlayHimOffKeyboardCat.com, launched on April 6, 2009, and BuzzFeed featured the format on April 10, 2009. For most of that year, appending the cat to a video was one of the internet’s default jokes.

Schmidt later adopted another orange tabby, Bento, who took over as the public Keyboard Cat for media appearances, advertising and live events. Bento died on March 17, 2018, aged nine.

Schmidt has also been notably protective of the work: he and Nyan Cat’s creator jointly sued Warner Bros. in 2013 over the unauthorised use of both characters in a video game, and the case settled.

Notable examples & variations

• The original “play him off” escalator video.
• Political and televised gaffe compilations.
• The 1984 footage on its own.
• Bento-era appearances and advertising.
• Later remixes and musical covers.

Legacy / cultural impact

Keyboard Cat is one of the foundational internet cat memes, and its timeline is remarkable: filmed in 1984, uploaded in 2007, made famous in 2009, and still recognisable now.

It is also an early and clear example of a meme where the creator retained ownership and defended it. Most cat memes of that era have no identifiable author; this one has a named artist who filmed it, uploaded it, licensed it, and went to court over it.