Tuesday, July 17, 2007

More LOLs, More Cats. (Perhaps that should be, "Moar LOLs.")

Loxoceles linked this - I saw this at her place. But I had to link it too just in case you didn't see it over there:

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. This is purportedly (a mockumentary of sorts) a 1920s-30s era comic strip featuring two hobo cats. And the captions? Well, there's the brilliance: the old-style cartooning is captioned using phrases that will be curiously familiar to fans of I Can Has Cheezburger. But, see, they're slightly double-entendre-ized (not in the icky sense, not like "Three's Company" double-entendres).

"Oh hai...I upgraded yur RAM" means something very different with two hungry hobo cats and a pen full of sheep.

And there's a "monorail cat." And lots of "Do not want!" or "I'm in your Y, doing X."

Also - who knew that ROTFL actually stands for "Royal Occidental Tuna Fisheries, Ltd."?

This is one of those things that's merely funny and charming if you take it at face value, but that gets really weirdly interesting if you think about it in kind of a meta way....without that "series of tubes*" called the Internet, this would never have existed....I wonder if fifteen years hence, there will be Cultural Studies Master's Theses written on the LOLcat phenomenon, and Linguistics Master's Theses on LOLcat grammar....

("Is not a truck! Is a series of tubes!" hahahahaha.)

2 comments:

dragon knitter said...

i giggle when i see lolcats, but as a rule? it's lost on me. apparently i'm clueless about a few things (hubbie tried to play frank zappa for me, and while the music was good, i didn't get the lyrics. i understood them, but they were too weird for me.)

TChem said...

"Laugh-out-loud cats" is brilliant. There was a exhibition about some of the comics-writing masters I went to recently, and the ones up until the 40's were all like that--funny but internally-consistent syntax, jokes which referred to who-knows what, hoboes. That person really nailed both phenomenons at once.