LOLcats don’t make me laugh out loud

I hate LOLcats, the practice of augmenting photographs of cats with infantile captions. I hate them so much it is difficult to find enough cognitive space between the hate to articulate why I hate them.

I hate them as much as I hate the Love Is… cartoons and Anne Geddes photographs, and for the same reasons.

I hate their gaudy sentimentality and simpering witlessness.

I hate the way they subvert creativity into mawkishness.

I hate that they’re so popular, because it means that the world is full of people who think that baby-talk is endearing and that cats have complicated personalities. (They don’t. Cats that ignore people are not exhibiting independence. They merely lack understanding of social behaviour.)

Every liberal principle I have that tells me to respect diversity of opinion is immediately quashed by the knowledge that I would, in the event of being among a group of air accident survivors, argue that we eat the people who like LOLcats first. I would do this even if the air accident was at Heathrow.

I wonder whether it is worth trying to compose a reasoned argument against LOLcats. Are they, after all, just a matter of taste? It isn’t hard to argue that they are sentimental (cutesy cats with baby-talk captions, QED) and it’s not much of a stretch to assert that liking them is a sign of emotional infantilism, but people are entitled to their views.

And if you deprived such people of LOLcats would they devote their creative energy to something less trite, or would they just go out and simper at Purple Ronnie cartoons instead?

Tags: hate, lolcats, sentimentalism