Serious Cat
Contents
About
“Serious Cat” is a one-panel image macro built on a photo of a white cat staring down the camera with a flat, unimpressed expression, captioned in white Impact type laid over the picture itself. The best known version reads "I are serious cat. This is serious thread." It circulated on 4chan, YTMND and the LOLcat blogs of the late 2000s, and the same photo doubles as a Photoshop exploitable, with the cat's head pasted onto other bodies.
Origin
The unedited photo was posted to the Japanese image site gazo-box.com on November 4th, 2003. It went unnoticed for roughly 22 years until a Redditor turned up the archived page and shared it to r/LostMedia in April 2025.
The edited version, with the serious expression worked onto the cat's face, is thought to have come out of the Korean humor site Humor University in early 2005, where it was posted beside a picture of DJ and rapper Jae Young to compare the two. Korean users called it "Jae-Young Cat" and passed it around DCInside, RuliWeb and Today Humor before it landed among Naver's most reblogged images that year.
It reached English-speaking sites around August 2006 through 4chan and YTMND, where the "I are serious cat" caption stuck and the name changed with it. A single-serving site, SeriousCat.com, launched in November 2007, and an Urban Dictionary entry followed in September 2009.
Meaning
The captions cast the cat as a humorless authority who has wandered into a thread and found the jokes unacceptable. Half the joke is the broken grammar. "I are serious cat" borrows the LOLcat writing style that was everywhere at the time, and the gap between that baby talk and the cat's flat stare is where it lands.
Most uses are about derailing. Someone posts it to needle a person taking an online argument too seriously, or to pretend to be that person themselves. It sits in the same slot as saying "this is a serious discussion," except nobody means it.
Examples
Popularity
See also