The original cat in the Keyboard Cat video was Fatso. Charlie Schmidt filmed Fatso in 1984 wearing a blue shirt and appearing to play an electronic keyboard, with Schmidt manipulating the cat’s paws off-camera. The playful footage later became one of the internet’s best-known animal memes.
Schmidt digitized and uploaded the old recording to YouTube in June 2007. It became much more widely known in 2009, when Brad O’Farrell appended the clip to the end of a blooper video, creating the “Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat” format. In those edits, Fatso’s cheerful performance acted like a vaudeville-style cue to remove someone after an embarrassing mistake.
Fatso is often confused with Bento because Bento later became the second Keyboard Cat and closely resembled him. Fatso had already died in 1987, long before the meme’s major breakthrough. Bento appeared in later promotional and meme videos until his death in 2018; Skinny subsequently became the third cat associated with the Keyboard Cat identity.