How Keyboard Cat Got Famous

[MUSIC PLAYING] BEN LASHES: Brad O'Farrell kind of started this whole thing. BRAD O'FARRELL: Oh yeah, I guess. BEN LASHES: The internet, he started the internet. BRAD O'FARRELL: My name is Brad O'Farrell, and I posted the first Keyboard Cat video and started the meme of mashing up Keyboard Cat to fail videos so he's playing people off. So the actual video of the cat was filmed in 1985, I think. And I was born in 1986, so I didn't film the video. The original video was made by a guy named Charlie Schmidt. And he's an artist who does lots of different mediums. He's kind of like an old hippie. It sounds mean that I said that, but that's very much what he is. CHARLIE SCHMIDT: You're not getting anything done on this spray paint thing. Look at this mess. If you want to see weird, just be it. BRAD O'FARRELL: Completely unrelated to Keyboard Cat, he has a nose that he can move like an elephant. He can move it in directions, and he used to be in Japanese commercials and stuff. And he has an agent for his nose. And that was his job at some point. I can't remember exactly how I came across it. I was looking at a lot of videos at the time. Every day, my job was to look at videos. So somebody sent it to me, but I can't remember who sent it to me. The first video that I made was just a fail video of a guy trying to go up an escalator on a wheelchair, and then he tumbles backwards. And then Keyboard Cat plays him off. -You OK, man? -Yeah. BEN LASHES: So that's when all of a sudden this video that no one had cared about started exploding, going viral, and turning his life upside down a little bit. BRAD O'FARRELL: And I was originally going to do a series of them, so I sort of made it into a template of-- I can easily repeat this template later, like a knock-knock joke type template. BEN LASHES: And why it was smart and why it caught on so well was-- so much about the internet that's about shocking people as much as you can. BRAD O'FARRELL: Then I saw people starting unprompted doing parodies. I was like, whoa. BEN LASHES: A lot of these videos that it got put with, you almost don't know if it's right to laugh. It could be the most awful thing that you've ever seen, and if you put Keyboard Cat at the end of it, then you can smile. BRAD O'FARRELL: When it was happening, I was like, yeah. I was talking to people about that all the time. Because something I did was on MTV Movie Awards, and Bill O'Reilly said that Keyboard Cat was a patriot. I just wanted to talk about it, because it was an interesting thing that was going on in my life. BEN LASHES: About a year and a half into it, we'd already done a Wonderful Pistachios commercial. -Keyboard Cat does it purrrfectly. BEN LASHES: Movie trailer from "Exit Through the Gift Shop," but he did it with all cats and he called it "Exit Through the Pet Shop." Still getting some cool deals coming across that was making Keyboard Cat a household name. BRAD O'FARRELL: Most of the stuff that's popular on YouTube isn't bloggers trying really hard to be popular. It's a baby biting another baby. -Charlie, that really hurt. Charlie bit me. BRAD O'FARRELL: You know, all these people that do things on the internet, there's two different categories. There's some people who ended up doing internet stuff, and they don't know how they got there, Like "David After the Dentist," where the little boy was at the dentist, and then he was on drugs. And he's in the car, and he's like, is this real life? -Stay in your seat. -[SCREAMING] I don't feel tired. -You don't? -Uh uh. BRAD O'FARRELL: You ever seen Tron Guy? He's this guy in a latex Tron costume, but he's really old and fat and has a pot belly. TRON GUY: I will never again be anonymous. And one of these days, somebody's going to come up with a way to synthesize 3D images from pictures on the internet. And 3D models of me are going to float around known space until there isn't any more. BRAD O'FARRELL: You know "Where the Hell is Matt," the guy who dances all over the world? His wife is somebody at Google. I've met him like eight times and never on purpose. I'll be traveling to a place, and he'll just happen to be also in that place, because we both go to internet videos things. People I've met on the internet and at internet conferences and stuff is like an alternate set of high school alumni friends, where you just follow where everyone is and you vaguely keep in touch. Do you guys know about meme characters at all? So Scumbag Steve is one of those. It's a photo of a guy in a really obnoxious hat. And he just looks like a ***. And people caption it stuff like, borrows your lighter and never gives it back. Your girlfriend's drunk, I'll take her home-- stuff like that. He turned out to be a real person. BLAKE BOSTON: Yo, what's up? This is Blake Boston aka Scumbag Steve. [MUSIC PLAYING - BLAKE BOSTON, "SCUMBAG STEVE OVERTURE"] BLAKE BOSTON: Scumbag Steve is that guy you do not want around, all right? He'll steal your lighter, he'll steal your girlfriend, he'll steal anything that you have. You have him sleep over at your house, he's taking your mama. BRAD O'FARRELL: He's also not a scumbag at all, but he has the demeanor of a scumbag. He talks and makes jokes like he's a scumbag, but he's actually super nice. [MUSIC PLAYING - BLAKE BOSTON, "SCUMBAG STEVE OVERTURE"] BRAD O'FARRELL: I think I've run out of things really with Keyboard Cat. I'm sort of just sick of doing stuff related to Keyboard Cat. I don't care about it that much anymore, but it's interesting that it happened to me at some point. [MUSIC PLAYING]