Keyboard Cat

A cat in an infant’s blue t-shirt appears to play an upbeat rhythm on a sampling keyboard. Charlie Schmidt is behind it, moving the cat’s paws with his hands hidden under the shirt. The cat is Fatso, and the tape is from 1984.

It first appeared in 2007, during early YouTube. The copy this index knows about is on YouTube.

The video sat for twenty-five years and became a meme in 2009, when Brad O’Farrell asked permission to append it to the end of a blooper video — playing the person off after their mistake, the way a vaudeville act got the hook. Within a month there were at least two hundred of them. What people remember is the format rather than the cat.

Fatso died in 1987, three years after the tape was made and twenty-two before anybody outside the house had seen it. Schmidt introduced a successor, Bento, in 2010, and a third cat in 2019 after Bento died. The clip has since appeared in games, adverts and television.