The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is an underground comic about a fictional trio of stoner characters, created by the American artist Gilbert Shelton.

In 1969 Shelton and three friends from Texas founded Rip Off Press in San Francisco, which took over publication of all subsequent Freak Brothers comics.

[6] In addition to those strips, new adventures appeared in magazines such as Playboy, High Times, and Rip Off Comix; these too were collected in comic book form.

The majority of the comic books consist of one or more multi-page stories together with a number of one-page strips; many of the latter have a one-row skit featuring Fat Freddy's Cat at the bottom of the page.

[10][11] Fat Freddy's Cat first appeared in 1969 in underground newspapers as a character in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip.

Many of these strips have been collected in comic book form by Rip Off Press in a series of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers compilations and later The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat, which ran for four small size issues in the 1970s.

The Cat is much smarter than Freddy, and while sharing many of his preoccupations such as drugs, food, sleep and sex, his stories also feature a fair amount of defecation.

However he tends to regard the Freak Brothers with amused contempt, frequently expressed by defecating in inappropriate and inconvenient places, such as stereo headphones.

Another story involves a scheme by Fat Freddy to replicate Dick Whittington's success and sell the Cat to the (fictional) small, oil-rich nation of Pootweet to deal with mice.

[14] The New Zealand band Fat Freddy's Drop, whose debut album won the 2005 Gilles Peterson Worldwide Winners Award, were named after the comic.

The science fiction novel Scam Artists of the Galaxy (2020) contains a location named Fat Freddy's Restaurant with a supercilious mostly orange cat.

The squalor engendered by the Brothers' indolence is often highlighted; several strips feature the household's cockroach population, ruled over by a fascist monarchy.

The story involves the brothers' attempts to raise cash to make their rent deadline (the trio being in danger of being evicted from their apartment).

Fat Freddy gains employment at a local food store run by graphic artist Robert Crumb's character Mr.

[23] In 1979, Universal Studios paid Shelton and Rip Off Press $250,000 for the rights to make a live-action Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers film.

An animated television series adaptation titled The Freak Brothers, based on the characters and set in modern San Francisco, was released on Tubi on November 14, 2021.

[25] The series features Woody Harrelson, Pete Davidson, John Goodman, and Tiffany Haddish as voice actors for the three Freaks and the cat respectively.

[29] Fat Freddy's Drop, formed in the late 1990s, is a Wellington, New Zealand, band that took its name from the Freak Brothers comics.

According to the band, individual doses of a certain type of LSD popular in Wellington at that time had the image of Fat Freddy's Cat printed on it.