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8.7.09 Entertainment Weekly
SE: Mitchell
By
benjamin
Svetkey
Illustrations by
Jessica Hische
SHE’S BIGGER THAN Megan Fox. Hotter than Hayden Panettiere. More downloaded
than Jessica Alba. She’s one of the most clicked-on females in Internet history. Her
name is Nora. And she’s a 5-year-old tabby who can play the piano.
In the universe of online cat videos—and that’s a much, much larger universe than
many dog lovers might suspect—Nora is a superstar. Her piano performances have
been viewed nearly 20 million times since they first started popping up on YouTube
two years ago. She has her own calendar, a DVD of her recitals, and two books for sale
on Amazon (Nora the Piano Cat’s Guide to Becoming a Good Musician and My Story: A
Picture Book). Earlier this summer, a composer in Lithuania incorporated one of Nora’s
compositions into a “CATcerto” with an 18-piece orchestra in front of an audience of
600 people. (A video was posted on YouTube last month.) “It’s nuts,” says Nora’s owner,
Betsy ­Alexander, a piano teacher in Pennsylvania for 30 years. “Nora’s got an agent.”
AE: Toni
Whether they’re playing pianos or getting stuck
in paper bags, cats are the undisputed stars of the online
video world. What is it about our feline friends that
keeps us glued to our YouTube? We take a
serious—really!—look at a seemingly endlessWeb phenomenon. Slug: Cats
Hello
Kitty!
closed
Issue Date: 1059
Web Obsession
Will Maru tame that box? Should the Keyboard Cat be played
off for good? We review some famous feline clips. —BS
CATcerto
Lithuanian composer Mindaugas
Piečaitis conducts one of Nora’s
compositions. “Nora plays with music
the way other cats play with toy mice,”
Piečaitis says. The song blows the
roof off the Klaipėda Con­cert Hall, but
we still prefer Nora as a soloist. B+
Gizmo Flushes
A black-and-white puss flushes a
toilet, watches the water swirl
down the drain, then flushes again,
then watches again—over and
over for nearly three minutes. Now,
that’s entertainment. A timeless
classic in the cat-video oeuvre. A+
KITTENS INSPIRED
BY KITTENS
The true star of this video isn’t one of
the adorable kittens shown in a book
of feline photographs (cute as they are);
it’s the adorable little girl who pro­vides
the kitties with silly dialogue (like
“I’m at work!” for this cat typist). B+
Simon’s Cat
“Cat-Man-do”
Technically, it’s not really a cat video. It’s
one in a series of simple line-drawn cat
cartoons. But it’s so funny and true—
and so brilliantly encapsulates the joys
and frustrations of cat ownership—
we had to include it here. A
EW.COM For even more crazy cats you simply can’t take
your eyes off of, go to ew.com/webcats
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This kitty from Japan delivers
in video after video and has better
timing than a lot of human
comedy stars. We love the clip with
the paper bag, but this one—in
which Maru hops in and
out of a box—is our favorite. A+
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Maru and the big box
8.7.09 Entertainment Weekly
PHOTO:
SE: Mitchell
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A cat in a blue shirt playing an
annoying organ riff is inserted into
blooper footage—like a man falling off
a treadmill—with the running joke
“Play him off, Keyboard Cat” inserted
as the title. Call us purr-ists, but
the cat’s paws are obviously fake. C
AE: Toni
Keyboard Cat
Entertainment Weekly 8.7.09
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Notable Kitty Videos
Slug: Cats
38
ICanHascheezburger.com (3)
CATNIP The hilarious I Can Has Cheezburger site, where visitors caption and upload their own kitty pics, is one of the most popular cat destinations on the Web
till, the potential is mind-boggling,
when you think about it. Even discounting for
repeat clicking, Nora’s piano playing has
pulled almost as large an audience as this
year’s finale of Dancing With the Stars. What makes the
cat-video phenomenon—and let’s call it what it is, Internet kitty porn—all the more curious is the fact that it’s
­e xclusively cats. There are undoubtedly sidesplitting
­canine videos to be found online, and possibly one or two
knee-slapping hamster movies, but it’s mostly felines
that are driving traffic. No other animal has so devoted
and active a fan base. How come? What is it about cats
that makes them so fascinating? Aside from the fact that
some of them can play the piano?
“That’s interesting—a cat playing a piano,” ponders Alan
M. Beck, director of the Center for the Human–Animal
Bond at Purdue University’s School of Veterinary Medicine
and coauthor of Between Pets and People: The Importance
of Animal Companionship. “Humans have very complicated
reactions to watching animals doing smart things. It
amuses us but also makes us uncomfortable. We like to deny
animal intelligence because it makes it easier for us to eat
them. But why are cat videos in particular so popular?
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that cats are
very infantlike. Their faces are very babyish. Their meow
is a very childlike sound. That’s why people tend to get
­obsessed with them. Perhaps it’s that same childlike quality
that makes cats so popular on the Internet?”
In other words, they’re cute. But after an exhaustive study
of hundreds of online cat videos, photographs, cartoons, and
tweets, we’ve come up with a theory of our own for why it’s
pussy galore online these days. For some reason, people expect
cats to be smarter than other animals. We interpret their
snooty aloofness as intelligence. So when we see one playing a
piano, or doing something else humanlike, we’re tickled to
have our suspicions confirmed. The only thing that pleases us
more is catching a cat doing something dumb, like falling into
a fish tank or attacking a computer printer; that’s a soothing
reminder of our human superiority. Either way, it makes cat
videos like Nora’s “Practice Makes Purr-fect” irresistible
even to people who don’t much care for cats…or their atonal
­Gustavo ­Santaolalla-esque compositions.
“One day we heard this pinging noise downstairs and it
was Nora playing the piano,” says Betsy Alexander. “Then
she started coming downstairs when my music students
were here. She’d get up on the other piano and start playing along with them. Especially when they played Bach—
Nora loves Bach. My students helped me make a video of
Nora and put it on YouTube so my niece could see it. That
first day, the video had 71 viewings. The next, it was several hundred, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and millions. No, we haven’t made a fortune, but
that’s not my dream. My dream as a piano teacher is that
Nora inspires people to play the piano. If she can do it,
anyone can.” Just be grateful she didn’t have a drum set in
her living room. n
Issue Date: 1059
A
s it happens, Nora isn’t the only feline
­becoming famous online. There’s also Gizmo,
the cat who repeatedly—and ­hilariously—flushes
a toilet (4.8 million hits). And Maru, an adorable bundle of fur from Japan who appears in a series of
videos diving into cardboard cartons and getting his head
stuck in paper bags (as many as 4.2 million hits). There’s the
kitten who eats broccoli, the cat who jumps onto a baby, the
one who stalks like a ninja, and another who chases away a
bear—all of them being clicked on (and e-mailed to friends)
thousands of times every day.
In fact, so many eyeballs are glued to so many cat videos,
it’s fair to say they’ve become a full-blown pop culture
S
craze. There aren’t any awards shows
for them yet, and they don’t get ­reviewed
by ­national magazines (until now; see
sidebar), but cat videos are becoming as
much a part of some people’s daily enter­
tainment diet as the TV programs they
­record on their DVRs or the books they
download to their Kindles. And it’s not
just videos. There are websites ­devoted
to cat photography, like the ­L olcats of
icanhascheezburger.com (where pet
owners post pictures of their kitties with
punchlines like “Help the blanket gotz
me”), and catsthatlooklikehitler.com,
which features photos of cats that amusingly resemble the Führer (for cats that
look like Wilford Brimley, you have to go
to gatoisland.com). Yes, there’s even a
cat on Twitter, Sockington, who recently
passed the half-million-followers milestone with tweets like “pad pad pad
pad pad pad pad pad pad pad pad pad
pad pad pad pad pad what oh NOTHING pad pad pad pad pad pad pad
pad pad.” Snoop Dogg has only 370,000
followers on Twitter.
Animal acts are nothing new in entertainment. David Letterman has been
showcasing Stupid Pet Tricks for
­d ecades. And movies about animals
have always been crowd-pleasers (last year Marley & Me
grossed $143 million, without a single cat in it). There’s even
a whole cable network devoted to our four-legged friends,
Animal Planet, which sometimes gets ratings as good as the
cable news channels. Pets in ­general are a mega-industry in
the U.S., with Americans spending an estimated $43 billion
a year. And yet, as with everything on the Internet, nobody
has figured out how to make money from cat videos.
“The videos that are taking off and becoming viral aren’t
really professional—they’re a guy with a camera and a
cat,” notes Tracey Paull, digital-media director at Spark
Communications, a media agency in Chicago. “That’s a
really hard thing to monetize.”