Anyone who has lived with cats can testify that their sense of humor tends to tease. They don’t have the kind of facial features that allow you to smile; purring serves that purpose. Cats don’t laugh out loud either, but when a cat executes a prank successfully, they always seem quite pleased with it.
Some cat jokes are part of their simulated hunting games and activities. Popular with kittens is the secret stalking and sudden ambush of another kitten, older cat, human, basically anything. Adult cats will also sometimes play this game with each other or with humans. If the cat that is about to be ambushed, the Stalkee, hears or sees the Stalker, the cat that is being bullied may sit up and make eye contact with the Stalker as if to say, “Oh no, you won’t!” That round is attributed to the Stalkee cat who would have been ambushed had he not been alert.
Some ever-popular jokes cats play include:
Sudden jump from nowhere.
Bat on the back of the other cat when his back is turned.
And invasion of territory in slow motion.
An example of the slow motion invasion is the cat lying on a pillow with the human and gradually “hugging” closer to take more and more of the pillow until the human is almost forced to get up off it. From the cat’s point of view, this joke is also a matter of expanding its territory, at least in the short term. If the human tries to remove the pillow, the cat may vocally protest, as if to say, “Hey, that’s my space now!”
Much of the cats game has to do with their fine sense of attack range. I once knew an elderly cat who lived in a house with a very aggressive macaw. Those birds have powerful beaks and the macaw was larger than the cat. The cat could easily have been injured or killed if the bird had gotten close enough to bite it. He never did.
When the bird was out of its cage, the cat wisely stayed out of reach. But the cat observed that the bird was only able to dart through the bars so far once it was in the cage, so it was placed an inch out of range of the beak. He drove the bird crazy and never stopped trying to reach the cat. But the cat was calm. If that cat was laughing, she was doing it very quietly to herself.