I Can Has Cheezburger and the Impact-Font Cat

JUN 14 2006 · 12:00

Maru, the Japanese Scottish Fold whose box-diving YouTube clips became the canonical animated lolcat. The form I Can Has Cheezburger formalized in static macros lived parallel in motion, on every forum and Tumblr feed. Place: Honolulu, Hawaii · icanhascheezburger.com Figures: Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders · Ben Huh, who buys the site in 2007 Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami launch I Can Has Cheezburger? from Honolulu on 14 June 2006, named after the captioned photograph that becomes the site's founding image: a British Shorthair cat, mouth open, captioned in white Impact font with black stroke I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?. The photograph itself predates the site by a few months and was traced to a 4chan /b/ thread (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]). The site formalizes the visual grammar that SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]) and 4chan had been developing in scattered threads: Impact font, white fill with black stroke, top-and-bottom caption placement, deliberately ungrammatical English (lolspeak). The form is rigid by design. The rigidity is what makes it a vocabulary.