There's nothing we internerds hate more than when a nonsensical web joke slowly crawls its way to the mainstream media, who then analyse it within an inch of its life and completely kill any of its charm. The latest victim?

LOLcats. We were right the hell into 'em "back in the day" but reading this description of why they're funny just threw a damp old blanket on the phenomenon.

"It's important to remember that some of these pictures would be hilarious without any caption at all, just due to the 'cute and fuzzy' factor of the cats themselves," he says.

"However, I think the real beauty comes with the captions. The child-like grammar tends to evoke the sort of sympathy one has for any child or foreigner struggling with the language one speaks.

"In the same way that a child saying 'Miss teacher, I has a stomach ache' is cute, these image captions are cute. When cats are making grammatical errors, it's just a whole new layer of cute."

Urge to laugh... fading... fading...

Here's a detailed guide as to the different types of LOLcats, courtesy of News Ltd.

LOLcat lingo

There are a few regular types of LOLcat jokes, all of which are written in internet slang or "kitty pidgin".

The most popular type is in the form "I'm in your X, Ying your Z", such as "Im in ur fridge, eatin ur foodz” over a picture of a cat in a refrigerator.

Another is the "invisible X", such as "invisible swimming pool" with a picture of a cat caught in mid-air and looking as if it was practising freestyle stroke.

Another involves the phrase "let me show you them", where "them" refers to an object the cat is obsessive about.

Just wait til they do a retrospective on the amazing I Has A Bucket trend of yesteryear!

What's the new LOLcat, by the way? We understand that Dramatic Chipmunk has also jumped the shark, you see, and we're craving some new idiocy.

 

Tags: au | future walkley award winners | interweb