Tommy Craggs Is A Crazy Cat Person

Craggs does this voice when he talks to his cat, or any small animal, that makes him sound like Cartman.

I first discovered the voice when I was about two months into my summer internship at Deadspin. I had been bouncing around crappy sublets all summer, and I was coming up on a week during which my last lease would expire, but my friend who I was going to spend the last bit of my time in New York crashing with wasn't quite ready for me to arrive yet. This week just happened to coincide with Craggs going on vacation, so one day I (awkwardly) asked him if he'd let me crash at his place if I promised to take care of his cat. He (awkwardly) agreed.

I went to his house before work one morning to pick up the extra key. I was nervous, because even though I'd gotten along fine with Craggs at work, I was still pretty intimidated by him. I walked in the door, and Craggs was there with his cat in his arms. Then he started talking from the point of view of the cat, in the Cartman voice.

"Hey there. I'm Samantha J. Kitty. Who the fuck are you?"

I cracked a worried smile. Craggs put the cat down and pressed on.

"This is my apartment, motherfucker."

I bent down to pet the cat because I didn't really know what else to do. Craggs went on channeling Samantha J. Kitty's profane internal monologue for a bit, and then things suddenly snapped back to normal. He returned to his regular voice and showed me the where the bathroom and the cat food were.

I've grown comfortable with the voice since then, because Craggs is never afraid to break it out in the presence of a small animal. A girl in the office sometimes brings her corgi puppy to work with her, and when Craggs catches sight of the dog, he immediately stops what he's doing to go make the voice at it.

(Recently, he was holding the dog on his lap while it sniffed at something in another admirer's hand. "What's that?" Craggs said in the voice, speaking for the dog. "I'm gonna eat that and then poop that.")

He gets mad if you refer to it as his "Cartman voice," though, because he claims that it predates the character. And to be fair, the voice does have its own flair. It comes with a kind of southern belle's lilt. It's what would happen if Scarlett O'Hara ever got really into South Park.

Anyway, I looked after the cat and everything was grand. When Tommy got back from vacation, I found myself feeling much less intimidated.

Note: That is actually Samantha J. Kitty in the picture above. Craggs took her to get glamour shots, or some shit.