A Face Like a Verdict
Her real name was Tardar Sauce. She was born in April 2012 in Morristown, Arizona, and she died on May 14, 2019, from complications of a urinary tract infection, at seven years old. She was a cat. She was also, for a stretch of internet time that felt both brief and permanent, the most recognizable face online.
The first photo of Tardar Sauce was posted to Reddit in September 2012. Within three days a YouTube video had turned into a phenomenon. The face did all the work: a permanent scowl caused by feline dwarfism and an underbite, which together produced an expression of such comprehensive disdain that it seemed to communicate something true. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, watched the internet assign meaning to her cat’s face and went with it. By the end of 2012, Grumpy Cat had a Facebook page with millions of followers. In 2013 she won the Webby Award for Meme of the Year. Political campaigns put her face on election posters. She appeared as a guest on Monday Night RAW.
The money was real. Merchandise—plush toys, T-shirts, calendars, a film—reportedly brought in around a hundred million dollars. When a coffee company sold products under the name "Grumppuccino" without paying licensing fees, Bundesen took them to court and won $710,000.
What made Grumpy Cat work, I think, was the specificity of the emotion she appeared to embody. Not generic sadness or generic contempt—that precise mixture of exhaustion and disdain you feel when the world has once again confirmed exactly what you expected of it. The meme format demands something universal and shareable, and Tardar Sauce’s face was somehow both intensely particular and infinitely applicable. She looked like she had already seen the ending and found it unsatisfactory. A lot of us felt the same way.
She was one of the first memes to become a genuine celebrity, complete with earnings, lawsuits, and television appearances. That’s a strange sentence to write. It’s also just accurate. Some part of how the internet learned to make icons out of animals passes through her. She looked like she’d hate knowing that.