I bought a generic cat. It only had five lives.

This is a compact one-liner built on the folk belief that cats have nine lives. By calling the cat “generic,” the speaker borrows consumer language—generic products are cheaper, off-brand versions that offer less than the name-brand promise. The punchline (“only had five lives”) humorously treats “lives” as a measurable feature that can be reduced by cost-cutting, satirizing how market logic gets applied to everything. The joke also plays with expectations: the setup suggests an ordinary purchase, then pivots into absurd literalism, making superstition behave like a product specification.