Mr. Jinx

Mr. Jinx — Jinxie to his owner — is the Himalayan cat belonging to Jack Byrnes, the retired CIA officer played by Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents and its two sequels. He is, in the mechanics of the film, a device: Jack's absurd devotion to his cat is the clearest evidence of how impossible he will be to please, and Greg Focker's escalating catastrophes with the animal drive most of the plot.

The running joke is that Jinx is toilet-trained, a skill Jack presents as proof of the cat's exceptional intelligence and his own superior methods. It sets up the film's most quoted exchange, in which Greg, having lost the real Jinx, attempts to pass off a substitute cat that he has spray-painted to match — a scheme that survives approximately as long as you would expect.

Two Himalayan cats, brothers named Bailey and Misha, played the part, trained by Hollywood animal trainer Boone Narr. The toilet-flushing sequence was genuinely performed rather than created digitally, which required months of conditioning and a good deal of patience from everyone involved. Cats are notoriously difficult on set — they do not perform for approval the way dogs do, and a cat that has decided it is finished is finished — and the trainers worked in very short takes around whatever the animals were prepared to offer that day.

The character was popular enough to return for Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, and to become a fixture in the marketing for all three. He also, unusually for a comic animal, had a real effect on the world outside the cinema: sales of cat toilet-training kits rose sharply after the first film's release, and a fair number of owners discovered that the training montage compresses several months of frustrating work into a few seconds of screen time.

Jinx belongs to a small, distinguished category — cats who are funny without being anthropomorphised. He does not talk, mug for the camera or do anything a cat could not plausibly do. He simply sits there being enormously important to a man with a lie detector in his basement, and the comedy takes care of itself.