Business Cat

Origin: a cat named Emilio¶

The photograph is real and specific. Emilio, a black cat, was photographed by Daniel Vecchitto wearing a red necktie he had received as a Christmas present — a pet tie from the Etsy shop Whisker Kisses. On January 1, 2011, the picture was posted to the Something Awful forums by user Apple Jax, in the long-running thread “PYF Cat Pictures.”

It took three days to become a meme. On January 4, 2011 the photo was reposted to Reddit under the title “Business Cat,” and the same day the first image macro appeared on Meme Generator, captioned “No LOL here, get your ass in my office.” The character arrived fully formed: this cat is your boss.

Spread¶

Business Cat caught the tail end of the advice-animal boom, the stretch when a photo plus two lines of Impact text was the internet’s default joke format.

• January 26, 2011 — featured on I Can Has Cheezburger.
• February 15, 2011 — covered by Urlesque.
• March 7, 2011 — a dedicated domain, yobusinesscat.com, was registered.
• December 2011 — Quickmeme was hosting more than 6,000 Business Cat submissions.

A fan Tumblr launched in June 2011 and closed shortly afterwards, but by then the character no longer needed a home page; the template was on every macro generator in circulation.

The joke¶

Every caption runs the same collision: corporate managerial language up top, feline behaviour underneath. The setup sounds like a memo and the punchline is a cat. A demand for reports on the desk resolves into knocking them off it. A meeting is called at 3 a.m., because that is when cats want company. Performance is reviewed in dead mice delivered to the doorstep.

It works because both halves are already absurd. Office jargon is a euphemism system that says very little at length, and a house cat is an indifferent tyrant who issues demands and offers nothing in return — put them together and the manager and the cat turn out to be the same animal. That double reading is why the format kept generating fresh captions long after most advice animals had run dry: everyone has had a boss, and everyone understands cats.

Context: the advice-animal wave¶

Business Cat is a character macro rather than a true advice animal. Where Advice Dog and Courage Wolf issue instructions to the reader, and Socially Awkward Penguin and Foul Bachelor Frog narrate the daily life of a stock personality, Business Cat is a fixed protagonist with a fixed job. Its nearest relatives are the other workplace macros of 2011, and its captions read less like advice than like leaked internal communications.

Second life as a comic¶

The premise outlived the macro. Cartoonist Tom Fonder built an entire webcomic, The Adventures of Business Cat, around the same idea of a necktie-wearing cat running an office; it grew out of his gag-a-day strip Happy Jar. Andrews McMeel published two collections — Business Cat: Money, Power, Treats (September 27, 2016, 128 pages) and Business Cat: Hostile Takeovers. The strip ended its run in September 2018, with the full archive left online.

Legacy¶

The form Business Cat belonged to is gone: Impact-captioned photos read as unmistakably 2011, and the macro generators that hosted them have mostly gone quiet. The character survived anyway, because the joke is a premise rather than a punchline. A cat in a necktie is legible without a caption at all, and workplace humour never runs out of material. It remains one of the few animal macros of that wave still in casual use, alongside Grumpy Cat and Keyboard Cat.