Finally, a cuddly online fad even grandma can love

The jolly gray cat resembles a feline version of Dom DeLuise. More precisely, he looks like a cat who has just eaten Dom DeLuise.

One can almost picture him playing the portly actor’s role in “The Cannonball Run” and laughing so hard for the blooper reel that he coughs up a hairball.

White block type looming above his head like a popped thought balloon poses a simple question: “I can has cheezburger?”

That single absurd image launched the I Can Has Cheezburger blog and sparked the year’s silliest online craze: LOLcats.

LOL as in “laugh out loud.” Cats as in litters of critters photographed in amusing poses and coupled with ungrammatical asides such as “I made you a cookie… but I eated it” and “I has a butt; purhaps ud like 2 pet it?”

Forget pidgin English; this is kitten English. A few linguists actually have begun to study the LOLcat language and identify common caption forms.

One construction plays on an unintentionally humorous line from a video game — “I’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds” — that became a computer geek in-joke. Thus a picture of a cat emerging from a carton of Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats is captioned, “Im in ur cerealz, eaten ur box.”

Those linguists clearly have too much time on their paws.

Not getting it yet? It might be helpful to think of LOLcats as a catnip-fueled update on the old “Hang in there, baby” posters of kitties dangling from tree limbs. They’re like Garfield punch lines, only funny.

Well, you be the judge of that. If the cheezburger cat leaves you cold, this fad is not for you, my friend. But if his expression of what can only be described as hopeful insanity elicits a chuckle even as you attempt to resist its fiendish charms, hundreds of similar images await to eat up your day.

Don’t worry — you’re not alone. BusinessWeek estimates I Can Has Cheezburger generates $5,600 a month in ad revenues for proprietors Eric “Cheezburger” Nakagawa and the anonymous “Tofuburger.” (I tried to confirm the figure with the partners last week, but they didn’t get back to me. Perhaps I should have phrased my request, “I can has interview?”)

Quite a fancy feast for a site dedicated primarily to organizing and tagging a bunch of silly animal pictures (also called “cat macros”) that have been floating around Web forums for years as part of a tradition called Caturday.

The Cheezburger duo launched their blog in January after stumbling across the namesake image and succumbing to “a nonstop laughing fit for approximately 73.5 minutes,” as they recount it on the site.

Their genius, such as it is, lies in promoting a running joke from the Internet’s back alleys to the wider Web world. It was inevitable someone would do it, just as it was inevitable that similar sites would pop up to showcase the images.

These include lolcats.com, lolcatr.com (“the lolcat community and social networking site”), MacroCats.com, the LiveJournal Cat Macros community, MyPetCaptions.com and LolCat Buildr.

That last site underscores the interactive, Web 2.0 aspect of the craze. Both LolCat Buildr and I Can Has Cheezburger provide visitors with a simple way to upload their own cat photos and festoon them with goofy asides. The best ones soon enjoy wide circulation.

Like all viral online entertainment forms, LOLcats have mutated into more exotic strains. Other animals regularly get in on the act, for instance. My favorite: an elephant seal striking a cool Stevie Wonder pose while bragging, “I has a bucket”—only to recoil in agony when a handler takes it away.

There’s even a LOLpresidents site, but I don’t find the captioned photos of politicians remotely funny.

Could it be that, even as it finds a broad audience, LOLcats is jumping the shark?