The Polandball Wiki is another bastion of countryball information, which features 12.779 page-entries, 480.159 page-edits and 30.380 media files. Apart from these usual suspects, the countryball culture on Facebook is quite a deep rabbit hole of obscure countryballs, with pages dedicated to Ancient Empires ( SPQRball), meta-pages ( The Polandball Report) and religions ( Christianityball). On Facebook, the POLANDBALL page has gathered over 400.000 likes, and other Facebook pages such as USABall, EUBall and Germanyball also gained a fair share of followers. The amalgamation of these characteristics created a popular format to satirize geopolitical events – such as the aforementioned comic of the post-Brexit UK-countryball protecting its border from a separated Scotland, standing on a wall inspired by a Hadrian’s Wall/Game of Thrones-crossover.įast-forward to 2017, and the countryball comics have become a global internet phenomenon, with multiple internet platforms being dedicated to the peculiar characters. While the United Kingdom is already depicted with a top hat in his original comics, other countryballs also started to feature specific attributes, such as the USA’s sunglasses, the Netherlands’ red eyes or Israel’s rectangular shape. ‘Classic’ jokes persisted and were reused, such as the joke that ‘Polandball cannot into space’, which allegedly was first brought up by FALCO. FALCO’s mockery remained, with the national stereotypes forming the basis of an infinite amount of politically incorrect jokes. For instance, the countryballs developed their own twist on English: those that are not natively English speak ‘Engrish’, where letters are switched (‘you’ instead of ‘you’), words are abbreviated (‘pls’ instead of ‘please’) and mispronunciations are often spelled out (‘gib’ for ‘give’). The countryball phenomenon quickly began to spread, drawing from and building upon FALCO’s initial comics. He did so by drawing comics with a sphere-shaped character of Poland as a device to satirize Polish stereotypes. On the platform, user FALCO poked fun at the Polish poster Wojak for his broken English. According to multiple sources such as Know Your Meme, Wikipedia and various internet users, Polandball originated in September 2009 on the /int/ (international) board on a German forum called Krautchan. While the reasons for this is increase are mysterious, it is a testament to the popularity and relevancy of the Polandball comic on digital platforms.ĭespite their recent surge in popularity, Polandball has been steadily satirizing geopolitical drama and national stereotypes since 2009. The latter Polandball powerhouse, /r/polandball, saw a sudden increase in popularity in 2017. The comics can be found across multiple internet platforms, most notably on Facebook and Reddit. They are referred to as ‘Polandball’, or ‘countryball’. The above comic could be any random internet comic, but in fact is emblematic for a branch of cartoons containing sphere-shaped characters denoting a specific country, satirizing national stereotypes, geopolitical events and international relations.
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