Opinion: Cats in laundry hampers or existential turmoil: Why we love cat videos

You’ve seen them online and you know you secretly, or not so secretly, love them: the cat riding a Roomba vacuum cleaner in circles around a kitchen. In a shark costume. (Why ask why? Simply marvel at a cat owner who got her cat into a shark costume.) Then there’s the cat who compulsively keeps flushing a toilet. Or the cat who takes a flying jump shot out of a laundry hamper at the clothes his owner flings at the wall above the hamper. That’s one of L.A. Feline Film Festival director Erik DeLeo’s favorites. “Just Google ‘cat in hamper,’” he said.

I did. And I also got the cat in the hamper who grabs socks as his owner sticks them in — and the cat who stands on top of the hamper and then falls in. These are all part of the ever-expanding universe of cat videos that rack up millions of views on YouTube and have us giggling at our desks. “Can’t you see I’m busy working?” a colleague deadpanned when I stepped into his office to find him watching a video that his wife had emailed him of a cat falling off a table — no, vaulting backwards off the table. We both watched mesmerized. I forgot what I stopped by to ask him.

In general, we are a race of humans in the thrall of all animal videos. When the U.S. government shutdown turned off the National Zoo’s baby panda cam, panda watchers railed in agony on Facebook. When the shutdown was over and the panda cam went back online, so many viewers went to the site at once that it crashed.

But nothing seems to intrigue us as much as cat videos. When the Internet Cat Video Festival was held in Minneapolis in 2012 outside the Walker Art Center, some 10,000 people showed up. This year there are three large outdoor cat video festivals across the country that show the Walker’s 2014 cat video reel. The L.A. Feline Film Festival is one of them. It takes place Sunday in Exposition Park on Christmas Tree Lane.

“Cats have very stoic faces,” says DeLeo, who grew up a dog guy and now has two cats. “You see them doing these hilarious things with this stoic face. It’s comedy,” he says when I ask him why we love cat videos. “Cats haven’t been worshiped this much since the ancient Egyptians. Maybe it’s an imponderable.”

He’s right about the comedy. With their gymnastic skills and serious demeanor, they are marvelous physical comedians. And utterly clever. Consider the cat in one video (featured in the festival) who paws at a roll of toilet paper in a bathroom until he completely unrolls it—then keeps pawing at it until he rolls it back up completely. OK, right now, you’re either thinking ‘I don’t get it’ or you’re going, ‘Yes! How brilliant!’

But ultimately, I think, it is the inscrutable nature of cats that draws us in. We are fascinated when they reveal themselves on video. Dogs are always in our faces, so needy in their desire to please us. Cats are alluring because they are aloof and mysterious and intense. It’s as if we can see them thinking. In one of my favorite videos, a cat sits in a big chair, his paws resting on the arms. Suddenly, we see another cat slowly rising up from the floor next to the chair like a snake until he is eye to eye with the seated cat. The seated cat hisses at him, and without losing a beat, the other cat, wide-eyed, simply slinks back down out of sight. “Uhh, never mind…”

That sense of watching a cat and making up an inner life for him or her is a big part of the videos. That’s exactly what one enormously popular series of videos does right onscreen. The tales of Henri, Le Chat Noir, follow the existential cat, Henri, who lopes and lies expressionlessly around his home (presumably a Parisian flat) while an off-screen voice channels Henri’s musings of despair and bitterness — en francais, bien sur — with English subtitles. In one video that will be shown on Sunday, “Blight of Spring,” Henri decries the return of the spring season. “It’s the same delusion each year,” he laments.

So go Google ‘cats in hampers’ — and see if anything make you laugh. If it doesn’t, you can skip the film festival. For those who want to commune with like-minded cat video fanciers, the festival gets underway at 1 p.m. with bands, cat vendors and cat adoptions. The actual 75-minute video reel doesn’t start until about 7:30 or 8 p.m., but DeLeo suggests getting there much earlier than that if you want a good view. There are 800 seats or you can sit on the grass.

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