I Can Has Cheezburger?

"I Can Has Cheezburger?" stands as one of the foundational memes of the internet age, launching the LOLcat phenomenon and establishing the template for image macro humor that would dominate online culture for years to come. This seemingly simple photograph of a blue British Shorthair cat with broken English text overlay became the cornerstone of a media empire and helped define the participatory nature of internet humor.

The meme's origins trace back to the Something Awful forums, a comedy website known for creating and circulating early internet humor (Wikipedia, 2025). The original image featured a cat known as "Happycat" with the caption "I can has cheezburger?" written in the distinctive broken English style that would become known as "lolspeak."

On January 11, 2007, Eric Nakagawa discovered this image while browsing Something Awful and found it amusing enough to share with his friend Kari Unebasami. After chuckling about the image, they promptly registered the domain icanhascheezburger.com and created a dedicated website for similar cat-based humor (Today I Found Out, 2012). This marked the official beginning of the LOLcat movement as a organized cultural phenomenon.

The I Can Has Cheezburger website grew rapidly, becoming a central hub for user-submitted LOLcat images and establishing the format that would influence countless other meme sites. The site's success was built on community participation, with users submitting their own captioned cat photos using the distinctive lolspeak grammar that replaced standard English with phonetic approximations like "can" for "can," "has" for "have," and "ur" for "your" or "you're."

The cultural significance of "I Can Has Cheezburger?" extends far beyond a single image. It represented the democratization of humor creation, where anyone with a cat photo and creative captioning could contribute to a global comedy phenomenon. The lolspeak syntax became so influential that it inspired LOLCODE, an actual programming language based on LOLcat grammar (Today I Found Out, 2012).

By September 2007, the site had grown so popular that Ben Huh's investment group acquired it for US$2 million (Wikipedia, 2025). Initially skeptical investors were won over when Huh explained his hands-off approach: "Don't friggin' touch a thing. There's a community here. Without submissions, there's no content. And without content, there's no traffic" (Today I Found Out, 2012). This strategy proved successful, with traffic rising from 10 million to 30 million page views per month.

The meme's influence spawned an entire network of related sites and helped establish the business model for viral content platforms. I Can Has Cheezburger became the flagship site of the Cheezburger Network, which eventually included FAIL Blog and Know Your Meme, demonstrating how a single meme could evolve into a media ecosystem.

The LOLcat phenomenon pioneered several internet culture conventions that remain relevant today: the use of impact font for meme text, the top-and-bottom caption format, and the transformation of cute animal photos into vehicles for humor and social commentary. Popular variants included "Ceiling Cat" (a cat looking down from a ceiling hole) and "Basement Cat" (its dark counterpart), establishing character archetypes that influenced subsequent meme development.