December 1, 2025

Before the Internet, There Were Cat Memes

Long before TikTok and Instagram, photographers and artists were already turning cats into mini human stars, giving us the first memes more than 100 years ago.

If you think cat memes were born with the internet, you’re only off by about a century. Long before keyboards were smashed by paws and cats judged us through grainy camera lenses, people were sending tiny, printed cat jokes through the mail. In the early 1900s, postcards were the closest thing to a social feed, quick, visual, easy to send, and cats became one of the medium’s earliest and most beloved celebrities. What we scroll through in seconds today began as slow, deliberate photography, a little theater of props, and endless patience with animals who famously refuse to cooperate.

One of the earliest creators of what we’d now call “cat memes” was Harry Whittier Frees, an American photographer who began staging animal scenes in the 1910s. Working out of a small studio in his family home in Pennsylvania, he built tiny sets where cats “cooked,” “studied,” “played instruments,” and did chores with surprising seriousness. The props were handmade. The costumes were sewn at home. And the cats? They were cats, unpredictable, wiggly, and completely uninterested in behaving like actors.

Photography in that era required long exposures, so Frees often had to wait minutes for a single still moment. Even the slightest twitch could ruin a shot. He built gentle posing stands and worked in near silence, letting the animals move at their own pace. Some sessions took hours. So a single usable photo felt like a victory.

By the 1920s, Frees’ animal portraits appeared in children’s books, calendars, and most famously, postcards. At the time, postcards functioned like the early version of Twitter or Instagram, people used them to send jokes, greetings, and glimpses of everyday life. Cats quickly became one of the most popular subjects. And the captions from that era still have a quiet comedic charm: “Mother will be displeased.” “I shall never consent.” “This is very awkward.” Paired with cats in tiny outfits, they still land.

Frees wasn’t alone. Actually decades earlier, in the 1870s, British photographer Harry Pointer produced the “Brighton Cats,” a collection of images showing cats riding bicycles, delivering mails, and pouring tea. The humor is unmistakably modern. Cats were characters in these images.

Then came postcard publishers like Raphael Tuck & Sons in the early 1910s, who released entire series of “comic cat postcards.” Some featured the now-famous work of Louis Wain, whose expressive, almost psychedelic anthropomorphic cats became icons in their own right. At the peak of the postcard boom, around 1910 to 1915, billions of postcards were mailed each year, and tens of millions featured cats.

Flip through a stack of 1910s postcards and you’ll see familiar personalities: cats judging everything, cats ignoring instructions, cats in boxes, cats “helping” with household chores, cats causing little pockets of chaos. The humor hasn’t changed at all.

By the 1940s, printed postcards gave way to early film. One of the most famous examples, 'The Private Life of a Cat (1945),' captured a domestic feline family with the same mix of tenderness and curiosity that drives modern pet content. Different technology, same love, show people a cat doing something tender, sweet, or simply cat-like, and they’ll share it.

Today, cat content and memes travel faster than postcards ever could through TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and whatever new platform emerges next. But the impulse behind it all is old. For more than a century, people have used images of cats to send messages, make one another laugh, and pass along small, charming stories.

The internet didn’t invent cat memes. It just made them go viral.

More stories