OK, why is this making me laugh with tears in my eyes?
Where are those clips from? I watched the first and second. That kid in the second one will be lucky if he grows up remotely well adjusted. What a witch!
Play him off, keyboard cat: It’s not just for YouTube anymore.
No, I can’t explain why Keyboard Cat is so darn funny. It’s just the latest iteration of the FAIL meme, but it’s one of the better ones IMHO.
I recognize the first clip from one of those “Trading Spouses” shows.
And, yes, keyboard cat kills me.
The guy speaking spanish in the sixth video… what does he touch that makes him collapse? An electric wire? Why would electric wires be hanging among grapes?
Um, I don’t get this at all. Something bad happens to a person, a cat ‘plays’ a keyboard. Um, huh? Why? What’s the reference? What’s the idea? And more importantly, where’s the funny? I just don’t get what a cat playing a keyboard has to do with a bigoted religious screwball mentally abusing her child.
Intellectually, I am total agreement with you…yet…I am still laughing, not just about that one, but all of them.
It’s a mystery.
I think part of the appeal is the cat just so mellow and cool with the whole thing.
He or she doesn’t even seem to mind the dress.
It’s like a koan, only cute. Accept the nonsense, let go of the illusion of control - and laugh your ass off 
Although I must say the third one is frickin’ hilarious, cat or no cat. No presents for you !
I almost think that I can see an arm sticking out of the other end of the dress. If it’s puppetry, it’s pretty good, but I find that a lot more plausible than a cat wearing a dress and playing the keyboard.
“Play him off” is a technique going back to vaudeville (at least) where if a stage act was going badly, the piano player or other musicians would, at the order of the stage manager or other authority, start to play to drown out the performance and encouraging the failed performer to leave the stage. The practice continues now, perhaps most famously, in the band starting to play if an Oscar acceptance speech goes too long - even if the recipient wants to keep talking, there’s no point because nobody can hear them. The point is to declare “end this, move on, get him outta here” etc., and in a manner a bit more subtle than having bouncers show up and drag the person off stage.
In this particular case, the band is, well, a cat. If you think cats are cute and funny, this bit will probably amuse you. If you don’t, it probably won’t.
By the way, if you do like cats, I dare you to watch this and not laugh.
It’s a metaphor for international diplomacy.
That is an arm sticking out of the dress, but that’s a real cat. The owner of the arm is manipulating the cat to play the (very well dubbed) keyboard. The cat must trust the person enough to be so relaxed that the person can use the cat like a puppet. It’s cute.
If I caught them in the right mood, I could get my cats to do the same thing.
Yes, it was a shock. I found this in the Portugese (?) Wikipedia entry for that reporter, and had Google translate it:
There, doesn’t that clear things up?
I found it to get funnier as I went on to each subsequent video. The one with the guy passing out was just sad - either they both felt too much pressure to perform to deal with it appropriately, or neither one knew to get the head below the heart if someone feels faint.
http://playhimoffkeyboardcat.com/
Possibly my favorite one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FrrCJQ5EZg
Since this thread was only a week old, I’ve merged Least Original User Name Ever’s post into it.
Woot.com has made their server error page play keyboard cat at you.
I didn’t think of looking in Cafe Society for it. Gracias.
Leeroy Jenkins on page 3 had me laughing. Have to stop now.
Holy crap, that was all totally hilarious. It was like if Paul Shaffer was a cat.
That made my day.
Hey, do they have t-shirts of the Keyboard Cat? They should. I would buy one.