The Ephemerist

Unless you just came crawling from under a rock in the middle of the Gobi desert, you’ve probably been subjected to the all-encompassing phenomenon that is LOLcats, or Laughing Out Loud Cats. If you did just come crawling etc., just check here to get hep with it.

Ape Lad of Hobotopia finally sheds some light on the real origin of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. Supposedly, they were created by his great-grandfather, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford, for a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers in 1912. As he says himself :

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 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. (In reality, my great-grandfather was an expert climber and incredibly hirsute, and had earned the nickname in college.) Pressures continued to mount and Aloysius hung up his pen after only a year of working on the strip. He turned to a life of quiet dignity as a steamer captain and part-time walrus hunter.

I love could-have-been history.

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