In December 2011, mid-way through season 2 of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the cast attended a party hosted by Brandi Glanville in Malibu.
To say the least, it did not go well—because Camille, who was going through a divorce with Kelsey Grammar at the time, had recently outed the abuse that Taylor Armstrong was going through at the hands of her husband, Russell. At the time a lot of the details of that abuse had not been made public yet, so the show and the media made it seem like Taylor was overreacting.
The day after the original airing, The Daily Mail published a recap detailing all the drama, and which included this screenshot from the episode.
Six and a half years later, in a completely unrelated corner of the internet, a much cuter, and far less dark phenomenon was emerging.
Meet Smudge the cat.
In June of 2018 Tumblr user “deadbeforedeath” posted an image of Smudge sitting at a dinner table, looking not amused at all. The caption? “he no like vegetals.” Within a year, this post gained upwards of 50,000 likes and reblogs.
Smudge was cute enough to develop a following outside of Tumblr. If one simply Google image searches “confused cat at dinner table meme” one is served all kinds of options to buy T-shirts, stickers, and hoodies of all shapes and sizes featuring the feline.
He then earned his own Instagram account titled “smudge_lord.” It has 1.6 million followers as of the writing of this video, and is full of sass, cuteness, and general cat-hilarity.
People had been posting both confused cat memes, and ones made from The Daily Mail’s screenshot of Taylor back in the day, separately, until in 2019, Twitter user @MISSINGEGIRL realized how perfectly they go together.
Merging and morphing into an indivisible object labeling meme, the new “Woman Yelling at a Cat” meme quickly spread to Reddit—with multiple posts gaining five-digit upvote counts in mere days. It’s now ubiquitous everywhere memes are consumed, and losing the referent, works as a great subject-object joke.
In the left panel, we typically have our “Subject A” who is upset with “Subject B” for some reason. And in the right panel we have “Subject B” who, like any self-respecting cat, could not care any less if they tried.
It appears that Taylor is actually a fan of the memes, and that in the years since her appearance on the show, she and Camille have made up. When The Daily Dot wrote about how people were turning the meme into their Halloween costume, Taylor retweeted the article and then tweeted at Camille.
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