Anyone who spends time on a social-media website knows that one of the few omnipresent things on such sites are the ubiquitous cute and humorous cat memes. If you’re like us, most of them barely generate little more than a quick “meh”— but every once in a while, there’s one that gets us good, despite our perpetual jaded states.
Anyway, most of these memes come from publisher ICanHasCheezburger.com, a Seattle-based company that is the center of the new reality show “LOLwork.”
The show goes inside the office of company CEO Ben Huh and his eccentric staff as they attempt to make the world laugh by putting grammatically incorrect captions on cute photos of domesticated animals.
Will Sharick, the company’s openly gay content supervisor, talked to PGN about the business of being a pipeline for cute online humor.
PGN: Is the content for your website created in-house or is it stuff that people send to you? WS: Most of it is user-submitted. We provide the tools and templates for people to submit their own photos or they can choose from a large collection that we have in different libraries. People create the captions and then we look through it and put it up for voting. Then a lot of times our community decides what is going to be popular. We do some content that is created at our office. PGN: How much of the material that is sent to you actually makes it onto the site? WS: We receive so many submissions every day that we can’t feature all of them. We do schedule about 12-15 during business hours during the week. It is a smaller percentage of [what is submitted] but that’s what keeps people interested in trying to get featured on the front page.
PGN: At what point does trying to get your pet to do something cute and entertaining for the camera turn into psychological abuse? WS: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think our users submit photos that would reach that category. At Cheezburger, we have very strict terms that are listed on our website on what is appropriate and what is not. But we hardly see that at all, if ever. I’m making sure that they are approving things on our website that fall within our terms. I don’t choose the things that get featured on the website, but I do enforce the rules.
PGN: You have an episode coming up featuring a lesbian cat-themed wedding. How did that come about? WS: Two of our power users who really love the website and are on it a lot, they also happen to be two of my friends. I though it would be something fun to do for them.
PGN: Does being immersed in all that animal cuteness desensitize you to anything adorable or funny that your own pets at home might do? WS: Absolutely not.
PGN: What, if anything, would fans of the site be surprised to find out goes on behind the scenes at ICanHasCheezburger.com? WS: We get so many emails from our fans that want to know what it’s like to work at Cheezburger. Everybody thinks it’s such a wacky, quirky place to work and that we have a lot of fun and it is, but it’s hard to explain in an email. That’s why this opportunity is so exciting. We want to be able to give the viewers and fans of the website a look at what goes on behind the scenes at the office.
“LOLwork” airs Wednesdays at 11 p.m. on Bravo.