Smudge

Smudge is a white cat from Canada who, quite by accident, became the feline half of one of the internet's most enduring memes. In 2018 his owner shared a photo of him seated at a dinner table, leaning back from a plate of vegetables with a look of pure, narrow-eyed disgust. On its own it was just a funny cat picture, but the internet had other plans.

In 2019 someone paired that image with a screenshot of a woman pointing and shouting, taken from a reality-television show, and the 'Woman Yelling at a Cat' format was born. The juxtaposition of furious human and utterly unbothered cat proved endlessly adaptable: people swapped in their own captions to stage arguments between any two opposing viewpoints imaginable, and the template spread across social media on a massive scale.

What makes Smudge's fame unusual is that the cat himself did nothing to court it — his single expression of culinary outrage was enough. The plate in front of him was, fittingly, salad, a detail fans loved given his evident opinion of it. Years on, the meme remains in constant use, and Smudge stands as proof that sometimes all it takes to achieve internet immortality is a really good grimace.