Prolific illustrator and historian Apelad tells BoingBoing, "The truth can finally be told regarding the turn-of-the-20th Century origin of the Laugh Out Loud Cats." Snip:
Not many people know this, but my great grandfather Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, was also a cartoonist. From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser.
The strip was entitled "the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats" and featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip. The strip did not last long due to a run-in my great-grandfather had with none other than William Randolph Hearst.See, the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats was run by a one of Heart's competitors, so "Big Willy" (as Hearst was known in his day) used the bully pulpit of his media empire to hound and mock the efforts of my great-grandfather. Hearst scribes insinuated Aloysius was an actual trained gorilla and purported to have evidence in the form of banana shipping statements.
Link to the rest of the tale.
Reader comment: TK says,
Silly Apelad, he should be more careful next time. Cheeseburger was
invented as early as 1924 so 1912-1913 timeline wouldn't work! Link. Nice try!
Cheeseburger and LOLcat historian Apelad replies:
Eat it, cheesburger pedants.
His evidence, in the form of an ancient Lascaux JPEG, below.
Adam Morris says,
The Laugh Out Loud Cats obviously inspired George Herriman who produced Krazy Kat cartoons in the 1920s and 1930s. Krazy Kat speaks a mangled form of English as illustrated in this example: GIF link.
See also:
LOLCODE: LOLCats meet programming
LOLPresidents photoshopping challenge
Where LOLCats come from
Massive cache of kittah pix (aka LOLcats, cat macros)
Pedantic overanalyzer sucks all the fun out of LOLcats
Pedantic overanalysis of LOLcats not pedantic enough, says blowhard
LOLtrek
Cat macros hijacked by heartless homosexuals
Oh, how I love the gebril macros!
A fine end to a week of pan-LOLism
Google Maps Zoom and kitty on perch: the inevitable LOLcatting