Eurovision has been smuggling weirdness onto European television for seventy years. Bread baking grandmas, hard rock zombies, a puppet turkey in a shopping cart, a drag star in a silver hat, a violinist surrounded by flamethrowers. The chemistry is simple: three minutes of stage, a willing public broadcaster, and almost no shame.
This is our running hall of fame of Eurovision cats and weird stage acts, freshly updated with Vienna 2026 Semifinal 1 (12 May) and Semifinal 2 (14 May tonight). No odds. No voting rankings. Just the moments that should be on a postage stamp.
The historical weirdos: monsters, grannies, and a puppet turkey
Lordi won the whole thing for Finland in 2006 with Hard Rock Hallelujah, dressed as latex hellbeasts and waving a two-headed battle axe. They got 292 points, the highest tally in contest history at the time, while looking like the cover of a Slayer demo nobody asked for.
One year later, Ukraine sent Verka Serduchka to Helsinki in a silver suit and a silver star hat, surrounded by dancers in military boots, singing the gloriously meaningless Dancing Lasha Tumbai. The song finished second. The performer won the Barbara Dex Award for worst outfit and the internet’s affection in the same week.
In 2008, Ireland sent Dustin the Turkey, an actual puppet, in a silver suit, on a shopping cart painted green, white and gold. Dustin pleaded with Europe to vote for him on a song called Irelande Douze Pointe and finished 15th in the semifinal. He did not qualify. He did achieve immortality.
Then Russia 2012. Buranovskiye Babushki, a group of grandmothers from Buranovo, set a wooden table on stage, slid a tray of dough into a working oven, and sang Party For Everybody mostly in Udmurt. They came second. One of them pulled the tray out with her bare hands.
Honorable mention to Hatari, Iceland 2019, the self-described anti-capitalist BDSM techno collective. Harnesses, chains, a cage that looked vaguely like a bomb. Tenth place. Maximum chaos.
The cat-coded category: mascots, plushes, and the animals you cannot bring on stage
Here is the thing about real cats at Eurovision. There aren’t any. The EBU bans live animals on stage, so every cat moment in contest history has been a costume, a puppet, a hologram, or a digital projection. The most recent workaround came from Croatia in 2024, when Baby Lasagna filled his LED wall with neon farm animals during Rim Tim Tagi Dim, with a few cats among them.
The cat energy keeps leaking in anyway. Austria’s Alf Poier in 2003 put cardboard farm animals on stands behind him like a kindergarten nativity. Belarus tried to bring real wolves on stage in 2016 with Ivan, got denied, and ended up with a holographic wolf and a holographic naked performer instead. Eurovision is the only place where “we wanted wolves but had to settle for projections” is a normal production note.
The most cat-coded element of 2026 is the official mascot, Auri. ORF designed Auri as a fuzzy, smiling creature in purple and fuchsia, with a yellow crest, striped socks, and a purple donut-shaped nose. Officially Auri is not a cat. Look at Auri. Auri is a cat.
If you want the full taxonomy of feline internet history that led to all this, our complete history of cat memes from Victorian cabinet cards to AI brainrot is the prequel to every Eurovision mascot decision since 2010.
Vienna 2026 Semifinal 1: filing cabinets, flamethrowers, and a robot in silver
Tuesday night the Wiener Stadthalle set the tone. Finland’s Linda Lampenius played a live miked violin during Liekinheitin while flamethrowers fired behind her, the first live string instrument on the Eurovision stage in roughly three decades. The pyrotechnics did most of the talking.
Armenia’s Simón staged a Latin pop number with choreography around filing cabinets, because nothing says continental glamour like office furniture. Lithuania’s Lion Ceccah performed Sólo quiero más covered head to toe in silver makeup as a robot yearning for humanity. Sweden’s Felicia performed My System wearing either a mouth-covering mask or oversized sunglasses. San Marino reunited Senhit and Boy George, which produced about six seconds of “wait, is that actually him” before everyone accepted the answer was yes.
For the full meme inventory from Tuesday night, our Semifinal 1 memes roundup has the filing cabinets, the flamethrower violin, and an Lithuanian electromagnet costume that allegedly collapsed during rehearsal.
Vienna 2026 Semifinal 2: the menagerie, the desks, and the bandura catwalks
Tonight’s show leans even harder into the surreal. Austria’s Cosmó opens lying on the floor surrounded by four dancers, with animal-headed crew climbing two descending frames while the LED wall shows hybrid creatures. The production team calls it “his menagerie.” Cosmó’s costume has reportedly gotten a metallic upgrade since rehearsals. This is the closest Vienna gets to a literal cat parade.
The United Kingdom‘s Look Mum No Computer brings a modular synthesizer act backed by office desks and treadmill-powered dancers. Cyprus‘ Antigoni performs Jalla on top of a long taverna table with four dancers crawling out from underneath, then a chair dance with pyrotechnics. Norway’s Jonas Lovv wears a glittering black overall and a tickly mustache, flanked by a boy band in red pantsuits. Bulgaria’s Dara stages her song in a “riot’s waiting room” with masked backing dancers. Romania, Switzerland and Azerbaijan all play with restraint and binding props.
We dug into six of these acts in detail, treadmills and bandura catwalks and Malta’s eight-sided LED zoetrope, in our preview six acts to watch in Vienna tonight.
Pudgy Cat picks: the five most shareable moments in Eurovision history
If you only have one tab open and you need to send something to a group chat, these are the five we keep coming back to.
- Buranovskiye Babushki, Russia 2012. The grandmothers, the oven, the bread, the bare hands. Warmest staging in contest history.
- Lordi, Finland 2006. Latex monsters win Eurovision. The rulebook quietly accepted that costumes count.
- Verka Serduchka, Ukraine 2007. Silver suit, silver star, meaningless rhyme, second place, Barbara Dex Award.
- Dustin the Turkey, Ireland 2008. The shopping cart. The puppet. Irelande Douze Pointe.
- Cosmó’s menagerie, Austria 2026. The first cat-coded staging of the Vienna era, tonight.
Honorable mention to Father Ted’s My Lovely Horse from 1996, a Channel 4 sitcom parody of the Irish Eurovision selection process. RTÉ now airs the episode every year before the semifinals. The song is a tuneless dirge with ridiculous lyrics lasting less than a minute. It is indistinguishable from at least four real entries since.
For a more sober rundown of which Vienna 2026 songs actually sound interesting beyond the costumes, our liminal songs picks that sound like a hallway at 3am covers the entries hiding under all the pyro.
Auri the mascot will probably outlive most of the songs from this edition. Eurovision is, deep down, a yearly excuse for public television to put a fuzzy creature on stage with flamethrowers and pretend everyone planned it. Seventy years in, the formula works.
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Originally published on Pudgy Cat
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