Smelly Cat

Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay in Friends. In this picture she is playing a guitar in a New York coffee shop named Central Perk.

"Smelly Cat" was the flagship song of Phoebe Buffay, a character played by Lisa Kudrow on the popular TV sitcom Friends. She regularly sang it as part of her act in the Central Perk coffee shop. The song is first heard in the second season episode The One With the Baby on the Bus (1995).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In the second-season episode "The One Where Eddie Moves In," the song was almost released as a commercial single (despite only having one verse), which would have apparently led to an album. However, this was halted when Phoebe discovered that the voice on the recording was not hers, but that of a middle-aged singer, who was too old and average-looking to be a serious pop star. Instantly realizing the connection between this singer and "Smelly Cat", Phoebe declared, "My God! That song has so many levels!" The music video for "Smelly Cat" featured on this episode is included as a bonus on the "Friends" Season 2 DVD, when you answer all the questions to the trivia correctly.

In the third-season episode "The One With Phoebe's Ex-Partner," Phoebe's former singing partner Leslie (Elizabeth Daily) used the song as a jingle for cat litter. This was done in spite of Phoebe's protests against playing her music for commercial purposes, and inspired her to write "Jingle Bitch Screwed Me Over."

In the fifth-season episode "The One With Joey's Bag," it is revealed that the song came from a lullaby that Phoebe's real dad, Frank Sr., used to sing her to sleep with, called Sleepy Girl, to the same tune of Smelly Cat. The only verse to his song was:

Sleepy girl, sleepy girl

Why won't you go to sleep?

Sleepy girl, sleepy girl

You're keeping me up.

Though this did not ever happen, one idea for the tenth season of the show was an episode in which Phoebe gets rich off a cover of "Smelly Cat", to be sung by Whitney Houston.^{[citation needed]}

In the second-season episode "The One With the Baby on the Bus," Phoebe finds that she has been replaced as Central Perk's singer by Stephanie Schiffer, who was portrayed by The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. In the episode's end scene, Phoebe teaches Hyde on the proper way to perform "Smelly Cat," continually (and comically) finds problems with Hynde's performance of the song ("from the top? There is no 'top', that's the beauty of 'Smelly Cat'", and, after Hynde adds harmony to the last line, Phoebe criticizes it as "too much").

The "Smelly Cat Medley" track on the Friends Again soundtrack, credited to Phoebe Buffay & The Hairballs (featuring the Pretenders), features a recording of the scene, and then a new, more artistic recording of the duet between Hynde and Phoebe. Hynde then launches into a hard-rock version with new lyrics.