Keyboard Cat
An orange cat in a blue baby T-shirt, propped up at a keyboard, "playing" a jaunty tune while an off-screen owner works its paws. Charlie Schmidt shot it on VHS in 1984, uploaded it in 2007, and in 2009 the internet decided that every fail video should end with him: play him off, Keyboard Cat.
The footage is older than most of the people who shared it. In 1984 Charlie Schmidt of Spokane, Washington, dressed his cat Fatso, a male born in 1978, in an infant's blue T-shirt, sat him at an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard and, with his own hands hidden by the shirt, moved the cat's paws to a bouncy little tune, recording it on VHS out of boredom. He digitized the tape and posted it to YouTube in June 2007 under the title "charlie schmidt's 'cool cat'," where it sat for nearly two years.
In February 2009 Brad O'Farrell, syndication manager at the video site My Damn Channel, asked Schmidt's permission to append the clip to the end of a blooper, a man in a wheelchair tumbling off an escalator, so that the cat seemed to play the victim off stage, the way a vaudeville act got the hook. He also asked Schmidt to let anyone use the footage, with or without asking. "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat" got a push onto YouTube's front page and the format spread across the site's existing stock of "epic fail" videos: by May 2009 there were at least 200 of them. The Associated Press covered it, Ashton Kutcher tweeted it to his million followers, Jon Stewart used it in a toss to Stephen Colbert, Andy Samberg warned 2009 MTV Movie Awards winners that long speeches would be played off by Keyboard Cat, Weezer had the cat play the band off every night of its 2009 summer tour, and Scribblenauts let players summon him. Schmidt retitled the upload "Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat! - THE ORIGINAL!"; it has since passed 90 million views.
Fatso never saw any of it; he died around 1999 (for years the date was reported as 1987, until Schmidt's wife corrected it in a 2026 livestream). Schmidt adopted a look-alike, Bento, who debuted as "Keyboard Cat 2.0" in a March 2010 video and worked steadily in commercials and a Puppy Bowl halftime until his death in 2018; Skinny took the job in 2019 and Presley in 2026. Schmidt defended the brand too, suing Threadless in 2011 over its "Three Keyboard Cat Moon" T-shirt and, in 2013, joining Nyan Cat's creator in a suit over the cats' unlicensed appearance in Scribblenauts. Both were settled.
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