Stereotypical Poles and Their Funny Beaver (Bober)

The aim of the paper is to analyse the viral presence of the beaver in the contemporary Polish digital sphere to identify the features of a specific text that make it popular, recognized, and spread in certain cultural circles. Our focus is to specify the factors creating its humorous potential and highlight its role in creating and maintaining stereotypes. The material we use as an example is the short video that had apparently not been intended to be humorous, but was received as such. Our hypothesis is that one of the reasons why it gained popularity was its maker’s exaggerated emotional reaction to the encounter with the actual beaver, and the language he used to reflect it. In addition, the video invoked the recreation of traditional, pre-digital stereotypes of a primitive and emotional Pole, and became viral, disseminating the ‘bober trope’. The video became popular across Slavdom, making the relation between a Pole and an animal iconic, recognizable and recontextualizable to produce further humour. The fluid transition from the video to other genres, especially memes and songs, was treated as a way of spreading the image of the stock Polish character and Polish language stereotype via an easily recognizable Polish profanity. The basic image played a vital role in constructing more elaborate narratives that reflect societal attitudes and beliefs across Slavdom. Following the early insights of iconology of movements and critical iconology, we explore the intricate relationship between the visual form of a stereotype and its corresponding symbolic meanings in order to embed images within a wider cultural context. We bring the approach up to date by drawing on the analysis of internet humour, looking at its mechanisms, such as variation, selection, emotional contagion or the need for social validation, and its contemporary more and more transgressive character. The study points out the dynamic nature of dialogue which serves to interpret and reinterpret stereotypes across cultures and examines the qualities of the beaver video example, specifically the attitudes of the meme beaver to Poles and the reverse, the beaver impersonating a Pole, and the beaver being presented on the symbolic plane.