We all love LOLcats (and if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about then where have you been?) but do any of us actually know the origin?
Not many people know this, but my great grandfather Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, was also a cartoonist. From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. 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 a 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. - Hobotopia
Of course, a Boing Boing reader points out that cheesburgers weren't invented until 1924 so the 1912-1913 timeline wouldn't work. The funny thing is - it's a pretty obvious hoax - that Boing Boing actually believed it in the first place!
It provided a good laugh though!
The real origin of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats - Hobotopia (Via Boing Boing)
|