2007·Early YouTube·funny
Keyboard Cat
You might remember it as Play him off, Play Him Off Keyboard Cat
- SourceLikely original upload
- MediaPlayable from the source
The clip a generation used to end an embarrassment: a cat in a blue t-shirt, playing an upbeat rhythm on a keyboard, appended to somebody else’s worst moment.
The line people quote“Play him off”
What this was
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. A surviving copy 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.
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
What we knowWhere it came from
High-confidence original source.
Earliest known source: YouTube
Created by Charlie Schmidt. Established by research, not by who posted the copy shown here.
- What happens
- 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.
- When
- Originally published c. 2007.
- Where
- Known on YouTube.