Cut Stories: Walter the Cat

- This is gonna be hard for me to talk about
and I may get teary.
Man.
He was such a shitty cat.
What a fuckin' asshole.
(upbeat music)
When we got him on Craigslist, we saw an emergency listing,
big beautiful cat needs home.
This woman ended up coming to our house
and she's like, can I leave him here for a few hours?
I'll be back and if you two get along, that'd be great.
And then she
she never came back.
This cat was obese,
he was just, he was like a basketball with legs,
his throat was so constricted with having too much neck
that instead of a meow, he'd make this sort of wet
nightmare gargle, this.
(groans)
We wanted a pet and what we got was a bloated pillow
with emotional problems.
When we brought him to the vet for the first time,
he actually destroyed the carrier that we brought him in
'cause he just was not happy to be in there
and the vet was like, this cat is morbidly obese,
his metabolism has shut down because of the history
of abuse, he's a beautiful animal
but I don't think he's gonna live for very long.
But that vet ended up dying of heart failure a year later
and we had Walter for seven more years.
(laughs)
I'm fully convinced that he was house trained
but he just decided to go to the bathroom where he wanted.
When we had this cat, we knew we were never getting
a deposit back once.
I remember coming home after doing a week of stand-up,
coming home and finding that what he had done
is he'd taken my favorite jacket from where it was hanging
and he had dragged it into his litter box, used it,
and then dragged that jacket and put it in the front room
so when I came home, I was there to see what he did,
letting me know that everything that was mine was also his.
I'm kind of like a furry, angry thing myself.
And sometimes I get trauma flashbacks and anxiety attacks.
Walter always knew kind of when these would happen.
If he was nearby and I would find a cat on my chest.
His head would be here on my beard.
He would just kind of meow and vibrate and take me out
of what was going on.
If you're ever experiencing
a panic attack, I highly recommend finding an obese cat
to use your beard as a pillow,
'cause there's just no safer place than being a cat bed.
I'm a
standup comedian.
My jokes about Walter were some of my first real successful
jokes as a standup comedian,
some of the first jokes I got paid for.
He was a constant source of inspiration, he was my muse.
My shitty, angry muse.
We moved with him and he knew that he was part of our family
and he would get to the point where he,
sometimes he didn't wanna touch us but he wanted to
be near us, he started to feel more comfortable
and we changed his diet and he started to lose weight.
He was just this beautiful, saggy thing of a cat.
We got down to about 18 pounds and so when he would move,
he would sort of flow like a beautiful sailing ship
made out of cat and eventually too,
he started to be able to meow.
We had never heard it before and you'd get this sort of
golden voice, 'cause this unused voice box would produce
this kitten meow, this giant monster cat
that had the voice of a child.
And eventually
Walter
started
being real nice, he started into kinda what you want
a cat to be, just this purry mellow cuddly thing.
One day,
the day before my birthday, I woke up.
He had
lost the use of his back legs
and he had crawled under the bed
and we realized it was time for us to say goodbye to him.
And
as he got that shot and sitting there,
just realizing that this chapter of our life had ended.
(fart noise)
The most vile fart that I have ever experienced in my life
escaped and I like to think that that was him
going to whatever glorious hell that cats rule over
and that was the best way
to say goodbye to him,
was
how he came into our lives,
this just stinky
beautiful monster.
Yeah. (gentle music)

Cut Stories: Walter the Cat

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