For about a week in 2008, Fox’s syndicated morning chat show The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet experimented with replacing on-air bleeps with a still photograph of a kitten eating spaghetti. The Soup put the clip on television and treated it as a joke. FishbowlLA called Fox to confirm. The answer was: yes, on purpose.
Then
The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet — the Fox-produced morning chat show that ran from 2007 to 2009, hosted by Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy — had run a kitten-with-spaghetti still image in the spot where a standard broadcast-standards bleep would normally have appeared. The Soup picked the clip up. The Soup, in 2008, was Joel McHale’s weekly E! highlights show that mined morning and daytime television for absurdity, and a kitten replacing a curse was exactly its register.
FishbowlLA reached out to a Fox spokesperson for confirmation, and the spokesperson confirmed the use was deliberate: “What you saw was our new bleep photo. When someone says something inappropriate we’re going to use something like that. You’re going to see a lot more of those in the future.” The original Tina Dupuy column reacted with appropriate horror — “the future just got a lot dimmer…and suddenly it looks a lot like LOLcats” — closing on the at-that-point already exhausted icanhascheezburger.com gag.
The Cheezburger empire was, in fact, peaking. LOLcats as a phenomenon had crossed from forum culture to mainstream media in 2007 and was at full saturation by 2008. The Fox bleep-photo experiment was the kind of culture-jamming you got when broadcast standards departments started trying to keep up with internet humor — exactly one step behind it, played straight.
Now
The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet was canceled by Fox in mid-2009. Jerrick went on to a long run at Fox 29 in Philadelphia, where he is still a co-host of the Good Day Philadelphia morning broadcast. Huddy continued in Fox News-adjacent roles and was a recurring presence in syndicated daytime television through the 2010s. The kitten-bleep experiment did not, in the event, take over broadcast standards departments; the conventional audio bleep persisted as the dominant solution because — as the original column basically predicted — replacing every curse with a photo of an animal made every show that did it look unserious.
The longer arc of the joke is that the LOLcats template did, in fact, end up being one of the dominant visual aesthetics of late-2000s and early-2010s internet culture, and a direct ancestor of what became image-macro meme culture on Reddit, then on Tumblr, then on Twitter, then on TikTok as static image content gave way to short-form video. The Cheezburger Network was sold in 2013 and the company has been through multiple ownership changes since; the original I Can Has Cheezburger blog still exists in a much-reduced form. The kitten with spaghetti, as a specific image, is preserved in 2008 morning-television footage and not much else.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2009 snapshot