Surprised Kitty

The original upload, titled “Surprised Kitty (Original),” was published on YouTube by rozzzafly on October 13, 2009. Know Your Meme identifies the kitten as Atilla Fluff, a 6–10-week-old kitten belonging to the uploader’s friend, and says rozzzafly tickled it repeatedly.

That October 13 upload is the documented public starting point for the Surprised Kitty meme; the evidence establishes the upload, not an absolute first use beyond it.

The clip circulated through a Reddit submission on November 27, 2009, then CollegeHumor the next day; on November 29 it appeared on Cute Overload and was tweeted by journalist Sean Bonner. Boing Boing, Dlisted, and Urlesque covered it on November 30, with Urlesque comparing the kitten’s reaction to “jazz hands”; on December 2, Ray William Johnson included it in an “=3” episode, and ABC News showed it during a morning broadcast.

On January 13, 2010, Daniel Tosh reenacted the clip on Tosh.0, wearing cat ears, a tail, and whiskers.

In March 2010, HuffPost published an article calling the clip “the cutest video of all time” and challenging readers to watch without reacting; in November, Animal Planet named Atilla Fluff America’s Cutest Cat.

Know Your Meme reports that the video passed 7 million views within two weeks of upload and had accumulated more than 61 million by March 13, 2012.

Surprised Kitty is a video of a young grey-and-white kitten being tickled, then throwing its hands back whenever the tickling stops. The joke comes from the repeated timing: touch, pause, and a sudden paw-flinging reaction.