팝 캣

Origin

Popcat is a meme that alternates a photo of a cat with its mouth closed and one with its mouth stretched open, paired with a "pop" sound effect. The star is a cat named Oatmeal, owned by Twitter user @XavierBFB.

It started in a private space. The owner, Xavier, posted a video of Oatmeal chirping at a bug to a private Discord server with friends, and they edited one frame so the cat's mouth formed an "O" and turned it into a GIF. The edit first went public on October 9, 2020, when Xavier's friend, Redditor Skettidragon, posted it to r/MEOW_IRL, where it earned only 122 upvotes over a month.

Spread

It caught fire the very next day. On October 10, 2020, Twitter user @partitiongal posted the two original images alongside the edit, and the tweet reached 1.6 million views, 57,100 retweets and 161,600 likes. It then spread to iFunny and Tenor GIFs, and from mid-October "wide-mouth singing cat" videos, edited so Oatmeal opens and closes its mouth to songs, took off on Instagram.

Three students at the University of Sheffield in the UK turned the meme into a game. Rain O'Sullivan, Ed Hails and Freddy Heppell launched popcat.click on December 11, 2020. Each click makes Oatmeal open its mouth, and clicks add to the score of the visitor's country on a global leaderboard. That ranking race turned into an international contest: Brazil passed 1 million clicks on February 10, 2021, Finland dominated the European rankings in April, and on August 12 Taiwan took first place, buoyed by its Olympic success. Thailand, in the midst of anti-government protests, then seized the top spot, with Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia locked in fierce competition. In its year-end roundup, Google Trends listed Popcat as the No. 1 trending game of 2021.

Variations and Spin-offs

It was also used for political satire. In Thailand, a parody site called popyut.click featuring Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha racked up more than 99 billion clicks before the government blocked it on August 1, 2021. The meme's popularity even extended to finance: in 2022 a Solana-based meme coin called Popcat appeared, trading at $1.35 in late October 2024. Know Your Meme's entry holds 518 videos and 40 images.

Usage

• Lip-sync edits that pair songs with the Oatmeal GIF opening and closing its mouth to the beat
• Posting proof of joining the "click war" to push your country or school up the popcat.click rankings
• A single wide-mouthed Oatmeal as a reaction image when you're shocked or speechless

Sources

• Know Your Meme, "Pop Cat" — owner @XavierBFB and the Discord original, Skettidragon's Reddit post on October 9, 2020 and its upvotes, figures for @partitiongal's October 10 tweet, spread to iFunny and Tenor and the singing lip-sync format, the Taiwan–Thailand–Malaysia competition, the meme coin, video and image counts
• Wikipedia, "Popcat" — the original video of Oatmeal chirping at a bug, the three Sheffield students and the December 11, 2020 launch of popcat.click, the timing of the Brazil, Finland, Taiwan and Thailand leaderboard races, Google Trends' top trending game of 2021, popyut.click and its August 1, 2021 shutdown