Obituary

Keyboard Cat was a real cat, Fatso, filmed in 1984 wearing a blue polo shirt and 'playing' an electric keyboard while his owner, Charlie Schmidt, held him and pressed the keys. The footage surfaced online in 2007 and was attached to the end of every failed video as the ultimate punchline: the blooper played, then the cat plays you out. Fatso died in 1987, twenty years before his own fame; his successor, Bento, toured the world as the meme's living ambassador. Keyboard Cat remains the only musician in this cemetery to have been dead before his debut.

Portrait: Matt DiGirolamo · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Born

2007

Died

2010

Cause of death

Died of a perfect performance, repeated

Last sighting

A YouTube outro, 2010

Resting place

Section Z, Row 7 — the ancestral plot

Category

audio