Crying Cat

Origin

The Crying Cat is not a photograph of a cat actually crying — it is a composite. The face of a kitten with teary eyes and a wet nose was grafted onto the body of "Serious Cat," an image already in circulation as a meme.

According to Know Your Meme's account, the earliest known use is an anonymous upload to Meme Generator on June 11th, 2014. There is, in other words, no identifiable author, and the image itself was assembled from parts of another meme.

Spread

It travelled not through one platform but from community to community.

• 2015 — posted on ask.fm by user YoussefArafa88
• April 9th, 2015 — posted to the German imageboard pr0gramm, where it acquired the name "Schmuserkadser"; that post accumulated more than 975 points over three years
• October 2016 — shared on 4chan as a fatter cat variant, captioned "First it's smug, then it's fat. It's living my life"
• January 27th, 2017 — posted on Facebook with "sad react only," drawing over 2,200 reactions and 440 shares within 18 months
• April 10th, 2018 — a Reddit user asked r/OutOfTheLoop where the meme came from

That last item is the measure of its reach: it was circulating widely enough that people were asking where it originated. Within four years of its 2014 debut, more than 925 derivative images had been generated from it.

Variations

Cutting out just the face and compositing it onto other subjects became standard — dropping the crying expression onto a person, a character or an object to exaggerate sadness. Another distinctive trait is that local communities gave it local names, as pr0gramm did with "Schmuserkadser," so the same image carries different lineages in different countries.

How it is used

• As a reaction image for sadness or a sense of unfairness
• As a joke exaggerating grief over something trivial
• As an edit compositing the face onto another photo to make its subject pitiable
• As the closing image on posts aiming for cute and forlorn at once

Sources

• Know Your Meme, "Crying Cat" — the June 11th, 2014 Meme Generator first use, the composite with Serious Cat, and the ask.fm, pr0gramm, 4chan, Facebook and Reddit timeline with figures