When the company posts job openings, it gets a flood of resumes. The subject line of one cover letter read: "I can haz dream Job? My rezumez! Let me showz u thm."
Huh hopes that celebrity coverage, which already generates huge online interest, will be another hit for him. For ROFLrazzi, users create funny captions for celebrity photos: Mr. T in a suit standing before a U.S. flag, saying, "I pity the foo that fails to comprehend the financial ramifications of subprime lending"; bouffant-coiffed and pastel-clad Duran Duran with the caption "1986. Gayer than advertised"; a bearded Keanu Reeves: "In the Matrix there is no razor."
Huh professes to love cats but obsesses over his 11-year-old poodle mix, Nemo. The dot-com survivor devotes long hours to the websites and works with a sense of purpose along with a sense of humor.
"We want to make people happy for five minutes a day," he said.
Fortunately for him, the Internet has been God's gift to comedy, serving as a 24/7 open mike for new acts and new forms of expression. Increasingly, popular culture is taking its cues from user-generated Web content that can quickly spread far and wide, said Tim Hwang, an Internet culture expert with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Hwang said LOLspeak has taken off because it has such broad appeal and can be applied to just about anything. Instead of sharing inside jokes with your friends, you can turn them loose in a much larger online community.
"LOLcats is a language that is going to continue to get bigger and bigger," he said.
But is it a viable business? It's a question Huh often asks himself. The banners and other display ads on which Pet Holdings and other Internet companies rely are being hit by the slowing economy. Research firm Nielsen Online said spending on display ads fell 6% in the first half of the year from the same period last year.
Still, investors are betting more than $2 million that the company, which Huh says breaks even, has staying power.
"Humor is one of those things that is recession-proof," said investor Geoff Entress.
But he says Huh and his team still face a major challenge: continuing to tickle funny bones in different ways so users and advertisers keep coming back for more.
Ada Courtney, 43, a self-described domestic goddess with four cats and two dogs from Rapid City, S.D., made her first Cheezburger entry a year ago. Since then she has added more than 1,100. Her cat captions have hit the front page five times and her dog captions six.
