Animal celebrities

Academic study of celebrity has hitherto been mostly based on the assumption that celebrities are human, and even semiotic theories of celebrity have been built around the notion that a ‘real person’ exists at its centre. In this paper I problematise this notion by discussing the case of animal celebrities, who lack many of the characteristics associated with celebrity and yet are discursively constituted as such by media and their audiences. I propose a taxonomy of animal celebrities and present detailed studies of three recent cases, all based in Germany, where captive animals have been celebritised by national and international media. Focusing on the collective mechanics of press and publicity, I demonstrate the operation of the celebrity/celebrification process and discuss the implications this has for our understandings of celebrity in general.