To find out more about this miscellaneous subreddit for feline aficionados, Bored Panda reached out to the moderator team behind r/MEOW_IRL. They told us that this subreddit was created by popular redditor u/AttackTheMoon in 2015. “It was created as a cat version of r/me_irl back when both subreddits were small,” they added.
Today, the subreddit gets about 30 posts a day, so the community is quite active. And how couldn’t it be, with so many funny cat posts being shared here on a daily basis? But what is it exactly about cats that makes them almost universally funny? Well, the moderators believe that it has to do with their faces, that are “capable of a lot of expression, and they line up with the expressions we make when we feel the same way.”
Moreover, “you can say a lot with just big eyes.” Another reason for how they conquered the internet, according to the moderators, comes down to the fact that “cats are also never acting, so pictures of them also communicate something that is genuinely felt.”
Funny cats rule the internet and there are no questions asked. They never fail to crack us up, and hey, who doesn’t appreciate a good cat pic, meme or pun? So cats take the biggest part of the internet’s cake, and no dogs, you may wonder? Well, dogs may be trying just a little too hard.
You see, the endearing appeal of felines is that they’re fundamentally unpredictable, very jumpy, often goofy and have these weird instinct-driven behaviors. Moreover, it’s no secret that cat owners around the world enjoy photographing and taking videos of their little friends, making some of the most watched content on the internet. No wonder that ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the internet"—it really lives up to its name.
Meanwhile, the viral expert Matt Smith, co-founder of the Viral Factory, has another interesting theory that could be an answer to the internet's obsession with all things cats. He believes it is partly because cats are so acrobatic: “Properly nourished cats and kittens love to jump and play around, and so, on a basic level, they are very entertaining to watch. They climb and balance and perform amazing feats. We are mesmerized by their agility.”
Combining their natural acrobatics (jumping through the room in the middle of night like Space X’s rocket, anyone?!) with boldness and fun-loving nature, cats are just hard to look away from. While investigating their environment, there’s a great chance they will come up with something that will make us all crack up laughing.
