Chemistry Cat

2011image macroclassic

Published August 22, 2026

Chemistry Cat is a 2011 advice animal image macro featuring a bespectacled cat in a bow-tie captioned with science puns, especially wordplay built on periodic-table element symbols. The series took off in late July 2011 after templates hit the major meme generators and got picked up by Huffington Post and other internet-culture blogs.

advice animals cats pun memes image macro memes early 2010s memes

Overview

Chemistry Cat, sometimes called Science Cat, is an advice animal image macro of a bespectacled cat wearing a bow-tie, captioned with jokes about science and the periodic table of elements1. The gags typically use atomic symbols as part of the punchline, like "Cats are composed of iron, lithium and neon... FeLiNe."

The photo shows a tabby seated in front of what looks like a chalkboard, giving it a professorial look that fits the joke format. Many of the puns predate the macro itself, drawing from chemistry gags long circulated in K-12 education and periodic-table lessons4.

Origin & Background

Platform
ICanHasCheezburger / Reddit (early post), meme generators (viral spread)
Date
2011

The earliest known Chemistry Cat post appeared in a Reddit thread on April 19, 20112, using an image sourced from the ICanHasCheezburger LOLcat blog3. The bow-tied cat photo itself is likely a stock photograph, possibly of Russian origin, and the exact source stayed unclear4.

How It Spread

The series stayed quiet for months before taking off in the third week of July 2011, when templates started appearing on meme generator sites including MemeBase, MemeGenerator, QuickMeme, and Troll Meme Generator5. Google Insights showed search queries for "Chemistry Cat" spiking on July 25, 20114.

Coverage from internet-culture blogs helped push it further. Huffington Post ran a roundup calling Chemistry Cat "the punny science meme sweeping sites like Tumblr and reddit," and pulled favorites from Buzzfeed's "Best of Chemistry Cat" list1. Writeups on The Daily What, BoingBoing, and FARK landed around the same window, and Huffington Post pointed readers to a downloadable template so they could make their own1.

How to Use This Meme

The template typically places a science-themed setup at the top of the image and a punchline at the bottom, often using atomic symbols to spell out a word1. A common convention is element-based wordplay, like combining iron (Fe), lithium (Li), and neon (Ne) to spell "FeLiNe." Physics and biology gags show up too, but chemistry jokes built on the periodic table are the core of the format.

Frequently Asked Questions