March 20, 2023
When my brother and I were little kids, around 10 (him) and 8 (me) years old, my brother came home one day with a stray kitten. The kitten was scrawny and had black fur with a white patch under its neck. He found the kitten by the railroad tracks. The fact that we lived in Queens, New York City, and were hanging out by “the railroad tracks” – at that age – might lead to a few questions. For example, why were there railroad tracks in Queens? I promise you they were there. Not the subway, mind you, but legit railroad tracks with freight train cars, like we were in Stand By Me. All of this happened and is true.
That was our first pet. We named the cat Moonshine.
And she was an absolute psycho terror bitch.
For the next 19 years, she would hunt each member of the household, and guests, for sport. We were all her prey. To this day we don’t know what happened at the railroad tracks that made her like this, but Moonshine would suck the air out of every room. She was tiny even as a grown cat, but she had claws that were 100 times more dangerous than any other animal I’ve ever seen, even at the zoo, or in monster movies. You would walk into a room and she would hide behind something, and wait just long enough to maximize tension, and then attack you, no provocation necessary. No questions asked. If Alfred Hitchcock were alive today, he would make a movie about Moonshine, and it would be his masterpiece.
To this day, all of our friends whom we grew up with still talk about Moonshine. It was funny, yes, but there was always a deep undercurrent of terror. Probably some mental scars. Maybe a nightmare from time to time about a predator that lurks behind a dresser waiting to pounce. This was Moonshine.
One of the most distinct memories I have about Moonshine was when she was so aggravated that she would make these guttural sounds. If you were smart, you would get the fuck out of there, but there was something so authentic about a house cat expressing the evolutionary phenotype of a hunter, that you were left in awe. Those guttural sounds were always followed by a frenzied psychotic kamikaze mission to scratch the fuck out of everyone, but, hey man, that was just Nature at work.
It is with this background that I recently became aware of an apparently classic viral YouTube video of a cat that makes guttural sounds, just like Moonshine, although these guttural sounds come really close to sounding like human speech. Hence the title of the video:
Talking cat says Oh Long Johnson
I literally cannot type or say those words without laughing. It’s just so perfect on every level. It’s a combination of every element of a great video – something unusual, something funny, something stupid, and perfectly timed.
It is the perfect length, clocking in at a crisp 38 seconds long. I can watch—and have watched—this video at least fifty times in a row without it getting old.
This is an old-school video, something that would have been at home on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Not one bell. Not one whistle.
The cat in the video, like Moonshine whenever the sun would rise, is clearly agitated. The camera gets really close to the cat’s face, which leads to a side-long glance of distrust as it makes the sounds. There is apparently another cat there that is inciting the whole thing, but the focus is on the star of the show. A black cat with a white chich, just like Moonshine. And then it pans out and fades to black.
The video is funny enough by itself, but the title and framing are just as important. The title of the video states as a matter of fact that the cat is a “Talking cat,” and then states, without any exclamation point or even all caps, that the cat “says Oh Long Johnson.”
Does the cat actually say the words “Oh Long Johnson?” Yes, it comes pretty damned close a few times, but part of the ridiculousness of the interpreted words is that the phrase exists nowhere else. It’s not like the creators of the video tried to put a round peg into a square hole to accommodate some preexisting phrase – Talking cat says Carpe Diem. Talking cat says Go Fuck Yourself. The phrase Oh Long Johnson, to the extent anyone is familiar with it today, is a phrase known to be uttered by a Talking Cat.
Oh, and did I mention that the phrase has clear sexual undertones?
Bottom line, it’s perfect.
So there you have it. Talking cat says Oh Long Johnson is as good as it gets when it comes to the entertainment art form of the short video. Putting aside whether a short video of real life can ever be considered Art, to the extent it is, this video is what The Godfather is to movies. It is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when it comes to classical music. It is War and Peace. I often lament that the younger generation, including all of my kids, spends an unhealthy amount of time watching short video after short video after short video. This sequenced form of neurological engagement is surely not a pathway to a fully developed artistic sensibility, or even an adult personality. One problem I have is that almost every video, or at least the subset they show me or I accidentally catch a glimpse of, is jammed with text and graphics and obnoxious music. In one neuron and out the other. This is perhaps why I find genuine solace in Talking cat says Oh Long Johnson, which proves that even in this swamp of lobotomized entertainment, there can be found bona fide artistic merit. Sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due. Someone was able to film their day-to-day existence and capture 38 seconds of magic, and then package it up and distribute it to the world in a way that makes a grown man laugh fifty plus times in a row.
To finish this ode to greatness, I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge those that brought this marvel of Human Creation to my attention. I am by no means the first to the punch. In fact, I’m so late, I might be able to get away with it. It was posted nine years ago and has 17 million views. But my teenage daughter had not seen it, so I feel like I’m in the clear. And, when she showed it to her friends last week, and none of her friends had seen it, I felt like Prometheus bringing fire to humanity. The fact is I’m actually writing history as opposed to anything of current cultural interest. Like most things culturally relevant or newsworthy, I only learned of this video from watching South Park.
Last week, I was travelling for work, which means at some point I was in a hotel room with South Park playing in serial form in the background, and on came an episode that for some reason I had never seen before – from 2012. It’s a whole episode devoted to doing dumb-ass memes, Planking and Tebowing, for example, often with deadly results. And there is a character in the episode straight from real-life YouTube itself – a video of a cat. Our cat. The Oh Long Johnson cat.
In the episode, the humans are concerned that, because cats are now able to create their own inane purposeless memes, cats have now reached a level of intelligence commensurate with humans, and openly wonder whether a war between the species is afoot. It’s brilliant.
So to South Park I say thank you. But to those who had not seen this video before, or just forgot, I say you’re welcome.
One of my favorite thought experiments is to consider what conclusions future generations will draw from any particular human creation that exists today. I always laugh when historians or archaeologists speculate about what some ancient civilization believed or how they lived or what they found important based solely on a small random set of artifacts – “oh, that cave drawing has a horse in it – they must have worshiped horses!” So stupid. When this flawed Civilization that we have painstakingly built over the last hundreds of years inevitably lies in ruins, part of me hopes that the only thing left for future life forms to ponder, whether human historians from the future or aliens from outer space, is a thumb drive containing bits of digital information, that, when finally decoded, reveals a video of a living room somewhere in North America. A video of a furry four-legged creature who utters an incomprehensible language in a state of maximum agitation, from which the only conclusion to be drawn is that these excitable creatures ruled Mother Earth through terror. Much like Moonshine ruled our house in Queens.
R.I.P., you glorious Freak of Nature.