Grumpy Cat

About

About

Grumpy Cat is the nickname given to Tardar Sauce, a snowshoe cat that rose to online fame after several pictures of her annoyed facial expressions were posted to Reddit in late September 2012.

Origin

Origin

Grumpy Cat was born in Morristown, Arizona on April 4th, 2012 to her owner Tabatha Bundesen. The original photos of Grumpy Cat were posted to the /r/pics subreddit ^[1] by Bundesen's brother Bryan on September 23rd, 2012 (shown below).

The Reddit post was instantly met with photoshopped parodies and image macros from others, reaching the front page with more than 25,300 up votes in the first 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Imgur page ^[13] gained nearly 1,030,000 views in the first 48 hours. The same day, three video clips of the cat playing indoors were uploaded to YouTube by Bundesen the same day.

Precursor

The name "Grumpy Cat" has been associated with pictures of scornful looking cats prior to this instance, mainly through the LOLcat image macro series X is not amused and Serious Cat .

Spread

Spread

Some Redditors responded to Catallades' post with photoshopped derivatives of the original picture (shown below), while others chose to caption the image with various statements from the cat's point of view (see notable examples ). Later that same day, BuzzFeed ^[5] reblogged the images in a post titled "This Cat Is Not Impressed" and by popular demand, Redditor Cataliades submitted a follow-up post titled "Since everyone liked Grumpy Cat here are a few more" ^[2] on the next day. Within 48 hours of the original post, more than 300 posts associated with the keyword "Grumpy Cat" were submitted to Reddit and more than 100 image macros to the Quickmeme ^[3] entry.

The newly christened "Grumpy Cat" was also featured on numerous animal photo blogs and internet humor sites, including The Daily What ^[8] , Paw Nation ^[6] , The Meta Picture ^[9] and Eat Liver ^[16] on September 24th and UpRoxx ^[12] , Daily of the Day, ^[11] The Huffington Post ^[45] and FunnyJunk ^[15] on September 25th. Some commenters even went onto draw comparisons between Tard's facial expression and other well-known stern-looking fictional characters like Ron Swanson ( Parks & Recreation ) and Dwight Schrute ( The Office ). In addition to its growing presence on Reddit, Facebook and YouTube, more image macros and pictures of "Tard" can be found on Tumblr ^[14] under the tag #grumpy cat. In addition, Grumpy Cat T-shirt merchandises are available for purchase on Clothes That Kill. ^[19]

On September 27th, Grumpycats.com ^[20] was created as the official homepage for Grumpy Cat, blogging videos, images and news mentions of the cat. On October 3rd, an official Twitter account, @RealGrumpyCat ^[21] , was also launched. As of August 2013, Grumpy Cat's official Facebook ^[30] fan page has more than 1.1 million likes.