The various Keyboard Cats have been owned by Charlie Schmidt of
Spokane, Washington, United States. The first Keyboard Cat video, created by Schmidt in 1984, featured Fatso, a male cat that lived from 1978 to 1987. Schmidt had made the video from a 1984 VHS recording (that was later digitized) of Fatso wearing an infant's blue T-shirt and "playing" an upbeat rhythm on an
Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. Off-screen, Schmidt was manipulating Fatso's paws as to appear to be playing the piano, with the shirt used to cover his hands doing this. Schmidt had only made the video out of boredom. 20 years after Fatso's death, Schmidt digitized and posted the video to
YouTube under the title "charlie schmidt's "cool cat"" in June 2007. Schmidt later changed the title to "Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat! - THE ORIGINAL!" as the meme began to spread. By September 2025, this video had received over 81 million views. The appending of Schmidt's video to other blooper and other
viral videos became popular, with such videos usually accompanied with the title
Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat or a variant. "Keyboard Cat" was ranked No. 2 on
Current TV's list of 50 Greatest Viral Videos. The first such "Keyboard Cat" video, entitled "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat", was created by Brad O'Farrell, the syndication manager of the video website
My Damn Channel. O'Farrell both secured Schmidt's permission to use footage and asked Schmidt to allow anyone to use the footage with or without permission. O'Farrell used the footage by appending it to the end of a video of a person in a wheelchair falling awkwardly off an escalator, with the appended Fatso footage appearing to "play" that person offstage in a similar manner as getting the hook in the days of
vaudeville. O'Farrell had posted his video in February 2009, though this video had been removed from YouTube due to reported copyright violations. O'Farrell used his connections on YouTube to help promote the video to be featured on the front page of YouTube, which caused other users to create similar videos based on "
epic fail" videos already posted on YouTube, all appended with the Fatso footage and typically named in the same fashion. By May 2009, at least 200 videos had been created. The meme received boosts from media attention in May 2009 which included coverage in press outlets like the
Associated Press, Keyboard Cat references grew in the media throughout 2009, fully establishing it as a meme. At the 2009
MTV Movie Awards,
Andy Samberg's opening monologue suggested that award winners whose speech went on too long would be played off by Keyboard Cat.
Kato Kaelin also spoofed Keyboard Cat in a segment of
Tosh.0 entitled "Keyboard Kato" in the series
first episode. During
Weezer's 2009 summer tour with
Blink-182, Keyboard Cat would play the band off every night at the end of their set. The
Nintendo DS game
Scribblenauts was unveiled at
E3 2009; the game has the player write out objects to summon to solve puzzles, one such being "Keyboard Cat", which helped to draw attention to the title due to the timeliness of the meme. With the popularity of Keyboard Cat, Schmidt adopted a male cat named Bento who lived from 2008 to 2018, which was similar in appearance to Fatso and became "Keyboard Cat 2.0". Schmidt announced the next Keyboard Cat with a video of Bento "performing" as Fatso had done, called "Keyboard Cat REINCARNATED!" in March 2010. This video went to be used in a similar manner as the previous Keyboard Cat video. Bento died in March 2018 at the age of 9, and received numerous tributes from the Internet. Schmidt at the time was not sure if he would bring another Keyboard Cat to the Internet. In April 2020, the original channel where the video was uploaded from was terminated after getting hacked by a
cryptocurrency business group. The channel was later reinstated, but all videos that were uploaded onto the channel have not been reinstated as of November 2023.
Notable uses An
Easter egg in
Activision Blizzard's announcement for
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm reveals the game's antagonist, Deathwing, playing a keyboard with the text "Keyboard Cataclysm: Play 'em Off, Deathwing". A teaser video from
Ubisoft for its video game
Splinter Cell: Conviction, entitled "Play Him Off, Keyboard
Sam" parodies the Keyboard Cat theme. The
Xbox Live Arcade remake of
Earthworm Jim includes additional content, including one
boss character inspired by Keyboard Cat. The Keyboard Cat meme has been integrated into other memes, like Keycat and Keykitten. An
8-bit version of both the cat and the song have been created. Online clothing vendor
Threadless sells a "Three Keyboard Cat Moon" T-shirt based on the infamous
Three Wolf Moon design; the shirt design was one of the most popular that the company has had, and they have had difficulties in meeting the demand for the shirt. The shirt appeared in a television ad for the release of the
PlayStation 3 Slim game console.
G4TV's
Attack of the Show held a "Great American Keyboard Cat Competition" to give viewers a chance to create their own Keyboard Cat-inspired art, with over one hundred pieces submitted. Several of the top works from this were given to the charity Kitten Rescue to be auctioned off through
eBay. The MLB AL East Champion
Tampa Bay Rays used a variation known as "Rays Keyboard Kitty" (they also had one called "DJ Kitty") to rouse the crowd during its late season run, using a similar cat in Rays gear in several segments. On
April 1, 2011,
YouTube released a video showing the "Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911", including a parody of Keyboard Cat titled "Flugelhorn Feline". There are also a number of videos in which other music has been substituted in for the original song. For example, at the height of the popularity of the podcast
Serial, a YouTube video was released that showed Keyboard Cat "playing" the Serial theme song. On the homepage of the popular online game
Bin Weevils, one can get a glimpse of a large television screen at the Drive-In Cinema where a "bin pet"-ified Keyboard Cat can be seen. In one example, Keyboard Cat was appended to the end of a segment of
Desperate Lives (1982), a made-for-TV movie starring
Helen Hunt showing the effects of drug use (with Keyboard Cat starting after Hunt's character falls out a window and suffers from overdosing); after the video, the submitter then superimposed Keyboard Cat in the music video for
Hall & Oates' "
You Make My Dreams". During
Super Bowl LVII, the original Keyboard Cat video was featured in
YouTube TV's
NFL Sunday Ticket advertisement, edited to show the cat "playing" the
NFL Network theme music. ==Appearances in other media==