Why Cats Are Funnier Than Dogs and Always Will Be

Dogs are funny because they want so badly to be good at things and are frequently not. Cats are funny for the opposite reason. A cat does not want to be good at things. A cat wants to sit in the one spot you need, ignore you until the exact moment you are busy, and knock something off a surface while maintaining eye contact. The comedy is not accidental. It is intentional in the way that only truly confident creatures can pull off. A dog knocks something over and looks guilty. A cat knocks something over and walks away slowly, which is so much funnier that it is not really a comparison.

This is why cat humor translates to a calendar better than almost any other subject. The material resets itself. Every month the cat has done something new, looked at you with a new quality of dismissal, found a new box to sit in despite a perfectly good bed being six inches away. The photographer did not have to stage anything. The cat handled it.

The Face Is Doing Everything

There is a particular kind of cat expression that requires no caption, no setup, and no explanation. You have seen it. It is the expression that suggests the cat has assessed the situation, found it wanting, and decided to remain anyway out of a sense of obligation that it resents. It is the expression that means the cat knows exactly what you did and has decided not to bring it up yet. It is the expression of an animal that has been living with humans for ten thousand years and has developed strong opinions about the arrangement.

The best funny cat calendars understand that this expression is the whole joke. Everything else, the caption, the title, the premise of the calendar itself, is just a frame for the face. When the face is right, it is right for all twelve months, because the face is never wrong.

The Newer Humor Is a Different Thing

Internet cat culture changed what cat humor could do. Before it, cat humor was observational: here is a cat doing a cat thing, notice how cat it is. After it, cat humor became participatory. The cat has opinions about your choices. The cat is texting. The cat has accessed technology and is using it in ways consistent with being a cat. This is a real evolution in a comic tradition, and the calendars in this section reflect it. Some of them are working in the older register, where the joke is that cats are cats. Some of them are working in the newer one, where the joke is that cats are more online than you are and handling it worse. Both are correct. The question is which one your wall needs.

On the Gift-Giving Logic of Funny Cat Calendars

Humor calendars work as gifts because the bar for success is low in the best possible way. The recipient does not need to love art. They do not need to care about breeds. They need to find cats funny, which is a near-universal condition in most households. The only real decision is whether the person appreciates cats being caught out or cats being dignified about everything. These are different sensibilities and they tend to correspond to whether someone has owned a cat that was a planner or one that was an opportunist. Most cat owners can answer that question immediately, and the right calendar follows from it naturally.