Business Cat
Part of a series on Cats. [View Related Entries]
About
Business Cat is an advice animal image macro series featuring a cat in a tie in front of a starburst background. The overlaid text usually includes something an office boss would do or request, but with a feline twist.
Origin
On January 1st, 2011, Something Awful forum user Apple Jax posted a picture of her boyfriend Daniel Vecchitto's cat Emilio[1] in a thread titled "PYF Cat Pictures (it rises again). When the photo was taken, Emilio the cat was wearing a tie he had received for Christmas from Etsy shop Whisker Kisses.[6]
Three days later, the photo was reposted to Reddit[3] with the title "Business Cat." Several hours later, the image was put on MemeGenerator[5] and a second Reddit thread[4] entitled "Business Cat ain't no joke" marked the first appearance of the image macro, captioned "No LOL here, Get your ass in my office."
Spread
I Can Has Cheezburger[9] featured a Business Cat on January 26th, 2011. A series of instances was posted to Urlesque[8] on February 15th, 2011. It was also featured on Buzzfeed[11], Uproxx[12] and Smosh[13] between January and March. In response to the macro, Daniel purchased the domain yobusinesscat.com[2] on March 7th, 2011. The Quickmeme[7] page for Business Cat has over 6000 submissions as of December 2011. In June 2011, the single topic blog Fuck Yeah Business Cat[14] was created but not continued past that month.
Notable Derivatives
Template
Search Interest
Though there was some search traffic for Business Cat in February 2010, this is tied to a Japanese YouTube video[10] about a similarly dressed feline. Search jumped up in February 2011, a month after the original image was posted.
External References
[1] SomethingAwful – PYF Cat Pictures = Page 38
[3] Reddit – Business Cat
[4] Reddit – Business Cat Ain't No Joke
[5] MemeGenerator – Business Cat
[6] Etsy – Whisker Kisses' shop
[7] Quickmeme – Business Cat
[8] Urlesque (via Wayback Machine) – Business Cat Needs You to Come in on Caturday
[9] I Can Has Cheezburger – Business Cat: Has U Nawt Herd ob Dedlinez?
[10] Uproxx (via Wayback Machine) – Japanese Business Cat
[11] Buzzfeed – Business Cat
[12] Uproxx – Meme Watch: Business Cat
[13] Smosh (via Wayback Machine) – The Best of Business Cat
[14] Tumblr (via Wayback Machine) – Fuck Yeah Business Cat