Much of the entertainment of these sites is derived from the almost—but not quite—humanness of the animals, the way they flash what Ms. Frost calls “Princess Di eyes” to the camera: “When their heads are down but their eyes are looking up, like, ‘I know I’m being cute.’” In some of these images, according to Mark Dery, a cultural critic who teaches in the journalism department at N.Y.U., “the animal becomes an adorable simulacrum of the human, inherently funny for its pitiable inability to convincingly counterfeit human appearance and behavior—is anything funnier than a chimp in a business suit, smoking a cigar?—yet just far enough away from the human to hold up a hairy mirror to our own animal natures, the repressed beast within.”
This is where the LOLcats come in. While Cuteoverload’s images are bare—sometimes there’s a small annotation within the frame to draw attention to a detail—LOLcats feature an editorial overlay of fractured language on images of hapless animals attempting things like reading books or wearing clothes. An image of a kitten being bathed in a kitchen sink has the caption “u has betraid my tiny trust”; another shows a cat in a tutu with the words “I will kill u. Kill u till u dy frum it.” Some enjoy the cheap gags at LOLcats. But others, like Mr. Gottlieb (who says he likes LOLcats), see these images as mocking animals, and also people, via the animals. “Sometimes it seems like it’s a proxy for making fun of retarded people,” he says.
Sites that traffic in cuteness are open and to a certain degree guileless, whereas so much of the humor of LOLcats is cliquish (so many nerd jokes!) and condescending to a degree that makes some people want to say, I Don’t Want to Haz This Trend, Okaibai!
POPULAR THOUGH IT IS, much online cuteness is still consumed with the sort of furtive oh-how-did-I-accidentally-find-this-again denial usually associated with online porn. That may be because looking at cute images isn’t too far off from looking at erotic ones. According to a 2006 New York Times story by Natalie Angier, “Studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine.”
Several people who spoke to The Observer about cuteness used words like “obsession.” To hear them describe their favorite clips or photos of animals, they sound like people talking about particularly intense dreams or drug trips where the details of the story blur and what’s left is a kind of hypnopompic reverie full of kittens. And monkeys. And chickens.
And like pornography, repeated exposure to cuteness seems to inure viewers to its power, driving them to seek out increasingly exotic, esoteric images like interspecies videos in which a dog nurses kittens or bunnies (BBC), or, in one amazing instance, tiger cubs (National Geographic). Nikki Columbus, an arts e
ditor and writer, briefly ran her own site devoted to interspecies friendships because they’re “just so bizarre. But happy bizarre. It’s not like looking at some sad story.”
But many of the interspecies images are tinged with sadness, like those of kittens who’ve lost their mothers and so resort to suckling from dogs. Ms. Frost said that when she posts those kinds of things, “it seems to drive people absolutely crazy. Not only is it not the same species of animal, but it’s that extra step of that other animal [being] completely outside of the animal’s species, and they take that extra caring, nurturing step. … It’s just over the top.” If only humans could be so kind!
After you’ve seen a dog nurse a cat or duck feeding fish, the only place to go is up. Stacking animals—a cat on the back of a dog with a mouse on its back, as seen in a YouTube video that’s been viewed over two million times—is, in the words of one viewer, “the new hard-core.”
“Stacked!” Ms. Frost marveled. “How can you get any cuter than that?”
Mark Frauenfelder, an editor of boingboing, a site that tracks Internet memes with the attentiveness of a day trader, wonders if the LOLcatting and stacking actually portend a coming cuteness bust. “The Internet audience likes to jump from one fad to another quickly. You can’t predict what will hit next, but you can tell when the trend is starting to peak, when they have to start raising the bar. Putting other animals on top of animals or adding captions and LOLcats language and things like that means the pure joyfulness of the original stuff is not good enough anymore. It’s about to crash, and they’ll move onto something else. I have no idea what that will be.”
That may be bad news for Ms. Frost and her Merry Band of Snorglers, since Cuteoverload has a calendar coming out this summer and other offline projects in the works.
Hopefully, the twitchy zeitgeist of the Internet won’t move on by then. But for anyone still uncomfortable admitting their admiration for her work, Ms. Frost wants you to know one thing: “There’s no shame in kittens. It’s better than porn for sure.”
“Oh, well, I guess I should say that for myself,” she added. “Some 45-year-old guy might not agree.”
mhaber@observer.com
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