The aim of the study is to analyse the viral presence of the beaver in the contemporary Polish digital sphere and its impact on the stereotypical perception of Poles in the Slavic memosphere. In order to meet this aim, we analyse a short Polish video that features an encounter with a live beaver and the spontaneous reactions of the video maker to it. What we are interested in is his attitude to the beaver, expressed in the verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal behaviour, as well as the reactions to that attitude by numerous commenters, especially from various Slavic countries. What we wish to establish are the reasons why the relation between a Pole and the animal was considered not only humorous but even iconic, stereotypical, and suitable for recontextualisation.

The starting point for our analysis of the iconographic side of the presented material were the pioneering ideas proposed by Aby Warburg (1892), an author of innovative art historical methods. He is particularly known for his ‘montage collision’ approach and his Mnemosyne Atlas, which emphasised the heterogeneous nature of images and the ‘pathos formulas’ of the body in movement (Michaud, 2004). Warburg pays attention to movements that are activated by the juxtaposition of still images – the ‘iconology of interval’, that is ‘the space that separates the images. For Warburg, the image has no intrinsic meaning – it’s the encounter with the images spread out on the plates that produces sense’ (Michaud, 2015). According to Michaud (2004), Warburg fashioned a ‘critical iconology’ to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art, Warburg’s method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. He used ‘montage-collision’ to create textless collections of images (Michaud, 2004). His methodological ideas were developed by Panofsky in his Studies in Iconology (1939), where he connects objects of interpretation with acts of interpretation, and equipment for interpretation with controlling principles of interpretation, pointing out the history of cultural symptoms, or ‘symbols’ in general (Panofsky, 1939: 14).

Just as images may not have intrinsic meanings, verbal texts, such as humorous texts, rely on context to acquire interpretations. Still, basic ingredients of humour may be postulated, such as those summarised by Kuipers (2009). Humour as such is like an invitation and it aims at decreasing social distance. It is ‘generally shared, and most people attempting to be humorous seek out an audience’ (Kuipers, 2009: 222). The central ingredient to all humour is incongruity, which needs to be non-serious in context, as opposed to incongruities which are non-humorous, e.g. those occurring in metaphors (cf. Muller, 2015) or crime stories (cf. Triezenberg, 2004). The third ingredient of humour is pleasure: humour should be agreeable to the producer and to the receiver as well. As Lewis notes, ‘The final two ingredients may seem at odds with humor’s pleasurable and social character – which explains the persisting confusion in humour studies as well as in life at large whether humor is a good or a bad thing’ (2006). One is transgression (Kuipers, 2009: 222), the mechanism by which humour marks social and symbolic boundaries. Humour often deals with sensitive topics, touching on or transgressing social norms and moral boundaries. Such sensitivities vary greatly between groups, cultures, and contexts. Partly, this has to do with knowledge: you have to realise that something is a transgression to appreciate it as such. However, the affective component here is more important than the cognitive aspect: you have to feel the transgression to enjoy the joke (Kuipers, 2009: 229). The related and most contested ingredient is aggression, hostility, and degradation, which humour is often linked with.

To explain the virality of internet memes, we draw on the analysis of internet humour by Attardo, and his claim that memes are the locus of evolution, which depends on three mechanisms: variation, selection and replication. Variation is provided by the individual producing a new meme or a variant of an old one. Selection is provided by the choices of other users to adopt or share specific memes. Replication for memes means the reposting, sharing, forwarding, etc., of a meme. When we say that a meme has ‘gone viral’: we mean that the meme spreads fast, like a virus (Attardo, 2023: 23). Especially interesting is memeiosis, ‘the process of meme production’ (Attardo, 2023: 24–25), including the phenomena such as intertextuality, remixing, mashup, or invention.

In the process of replication, the initial (founder/anchor) meme may be classified as belonging to fails (Attardo, 2023). This happens, for example, to short video clips including somebody’s unsuccessful attempt at performing some action. Their popularity may be related to the high emotional arousal they may cause; this is one of the reasons named by Attardo in his answer to the central questions of why certain memes become popular and why later on they go out of fashion, side by side with their tendency to form clusters, simplicity, novelty/distinctiveness, and usefulness (Attardo, 2023: 161–172). The popularity of internet texts in relation to emotions was confirmed in the studies by Guadagno et al. (2013; cf. Molina 2020). The role of emotional contagion, which involves the convergence of one’s emotional state with the emotional states of those whom one is observing or interacting with, evokes a vicarious experience of sorts:‘when people watch Internet video clips, they may experience the same emotions as the people in the clip, and by forwarding that clip, they anticipate that the receiver will experience similar emotions’ (Guadagno et al., 2013: 4). Another factor that may contribute to the proliferation of Internet memes is social validation, which is the tendency for individuals to look to others to see what others are doing to determine if a behaviour is normative and appropriate (Guadagno et al., 2013: 4). The viewer feels called to comment on the protagonist crossing the boundaries of proper behaviour, thus further spreading the popularity of the video or meme in which the person appears.

The case study to be discussed in section 5 raises the issue of how Polish stereotypes (both auto- and hetero-stereotypes) function in the Slavic world. Comparing stereotypes entrenched in different languages, Anna Tyrpa (2013) asks about their national, international or maybe even universal character:

This research trend runs parallel to studies on communication styles, which tend to take advantage of the references to ethnic groups petrified in cultural discourse, complete with the related emotions and other features. A communication style could then be defined as ‘a cluster of aspects of conversational language behaviours which collectively specify a cultural communication pattern’ (see also Brzozowska and Chłopicki, 2015). For example, Fitzgerald (2003) identifies a spontaneous/argumentative style (one of her 6 cultural styles): blunt, direct, sincere, characterised by negative emotions and typically long turns, common in Eastern Europe (see also Chłopicki, 2017: 13). This emotional style of communication is well known among the older generation of Poles, particularly men, who tend to lash out at others when they touch a raw nerve. The Polish communication style of young people, on the other hand, seems highly cooperative and supportive of speakers in storytelling; they are engaged, linguistically creative, their narratives abound in humour and irony, are expressive and emotional, with negative emotions seeming to prevail, although a lot of positive affectivity is present as well (e.g. in the use of diminutives; cf. Chłopicki, 2017: 24). A feature of Polish communication style that is shared by both groups is its spontaneous, emotional, and sometimes aggressive nature.

One of the major diachronic studies on such Polish auto-stereotypes have been pursued by Niewiara:

Among these, the easily recognisable negative stereotype of a combative, quarrelsome Pole who tends to get drunk, but is also blunt, values freedom and does not care much of what others will think, has a humorous potential that seems to hit a sensitive nerve in other Slavs, as we will discuss in section 5 below.

The fact that it was the beaver that became an internet hero and caused such a viral reaction was not coincidental, as the animal is associated with a variety of cultural knowledge, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.1 Nowadays, beavers are widely known for being strictly connected with nature, especially water, as skilful dam builders, but one needs to be aware of the cultural history of the animal:

Furthermore, stereotypes of a beaver were spread internationally and related to treating the animal as a source of good quality waterproof fur, meat and castoreum. Beavers’ castoreum, a secretion from the skin glands of beavers, had been extracted for use not only in the perfume industry, but also for medicinal and food taste enriching purposes. Beavers were hunted for their skin, which was used to produce coats, caps and collars, and because of their price treated as a symbol of high status. Their meat was used for food, and the tail valued in medieval monasteries and noble courts, especially during fast seasons because of its scales, enabling it to be treated as fish, thus allowing the consumption for those who wanted to avoid meat eating restrictions (Nawrot, 2019). The belief in the fish nature of beavers persisted much longer than it might be thought. At the turn of the 20th century, Zygmunt Gloger wrote: ‘Polish cuisine adopted ‘plusk’ [lit. ‘splash’], i.e. the beaver’s tail, which was eaten during Lent, because it was considered a fish on account of its being covered with scales’ (Gloger, 1900 in Spodaryk, 2019; our translation).

In Polish, just as in English, the word ‘beaver’ has sexual connotations. ‘Beaver’ in the gynaecological sense is a British slang meaning dating from 1927, transferred from the earlier sense of ‘a bearded man’ (1910), or from the appearance of split beaver pelts (Beaver, 2025). The Latin word for beaver, ‘castor,’ had also been connected in the past with the word ‘castare’ – ‘castrate’, which led to legends illustrated in multiple works of art about the self-castration of beavers who wanted to avoid death from the hand of hunters. Aesop’s tale ‘The Beaver’ used this motive, which was repeated in stories created later as well. The belief in the self-castration of beavers had remained in folklore until very recent times and became the basis for various proverbs. Zygmunt Gloger noted:

Also, the playful, rhyming expression ‘Dobrze panie bobrze’, (‘Good, Mr Beaver’) indicating agreement, became a common saying in Polish, invented by well-known early 19^th century Polish playwright and comedy writer Aleksander Fredro. Below is the quotation from the original poem, where the expression in question has been translated contextually as ‘Eager beaver’ for the sake of euphony.

A number of other writers took after him and used the expression, as well as the corresponding negative variant of it, ‘niedobrze, panie bobrze’ (‘Not good, Mr Beaver’), e.g. in a poem by Jerzy Jurandot, put to music in 1934 (Chór Dana – Niedobrze, panie Bobrze!).

In addition, the beaver used to be associated with good fortune, an association which Poles shared with Russians:

The rich cultural spectrum of stereotypes of Poles happens to coincide with a range of cultural associations with beavers in an amateur video which has evoked incongruity and humorous reactions and became viral across Slavdom. In the video, a tipsy man spots a beaver and exclaims in amazement:

The video has a history to it,3 since, as Weedston (2024) claims, ‘[s]tarting in the 2010s, it became a trend in Poland for young men to go out and make hysterical videos of beavers’. Liznikova (2024) agrees, saying:

Weedston (2024) continues the story:

Starting in 2023, Bobr Kurwa videos made it to TikTok where they went viral among Slavic as well as English language speakers. One particularly popular entry, with 5.4 million views by user @mxtteo.ws, shows him picking up a wombat and declaring ‘bóbr kurwa’ to its baffled little face. Sakshi (2025) adds: ‘A notable “Bóbr” video was posted to YouTube by Fred Pierwszy Wielki on April 26th, 2017. The video shows a man cackling while chasing a beaver, gathering over 8 million plays in six years’. Liznikova (2024) adds:

The video that we are discussing here was published by the user named Drak Bóbr (2022), and became viral, obtaining 3,044,801 views by 12 April 2022 (three years later, in 2025, it was still watched and commented on). Among the multiple comments, a few have been selected to demonstrate how the video, originally unintended as amusing, was considered funny by the viewers from various countries. Among the triggers of funniness, they underline the surprisingly easy understanding of the exclamations and profanities, followed by equally surprising positive emotions for Poles and their language (original spelling):

The video and the viral reactions to it invoked the recreation of the pre-digital, traditional stereotype of a primitive and emotional Pole, and became viral, disseminating the ‘bober trope’. The popularity of it resulted in an explosion of online reactions and parodies, to such an extent that ‘Bóbr’ became an entry in Nonsensopedia. Polish Encyclopedia of Humor, where the exclamations of the videomaker (‘Bóbr kurwa. Ja pierdolę, jakie bydle! Bober!’) are defined as standard words of a Pole seeing a beaver. Bóbr is defined there as:

Furthermore, it turned out that the image of the ‘bober’ easily spread from the original video to other genres, especially memes, all kind of mashups and parodies, but also songs, which contributed to spreading the image of the stock Polish character and stereotypical associations with the typical and easily recognizable Polish profanity ‘kurwa,’ as well as with the Polish language as such (as exemplified by the comments above).

Liznikova (2024) thus analyses the meme, summarizing the comments above:

Overall, one could argue that the viral spread of the video stems less from explicitly evoking national stereotypes of the Poles among other Slavs than from its remarkable emotional openness and linguistic accessibility across Slavic and non-Slavic audiences. Still, this is only part of the picture, since in our view this does explain the curious sense of simple, basic ethnic closeness with the Poles that Russian speakers in particular display. Furthermore, the video and its popularity may serve as interesting evidence of how unhindered emotionality may evoke humorous incongruity, although the profanities themselves are rarely admitted to evoke humour by themselves (see the critical discussion of profanity and humour in Chafe, 2007) as they normally demand contextual reinforcement or at least the value of surprise. At the same time the beaver image becomes an icon of sorts, deprived of meaning as Wartburg would claim, and only when juxtaposed with the image of the stereotypical Pole does it acquire the status of ‘interval,’ helping the transformation of the video into a viral one.

The reactions to the above-mentioned viral Tik-Tok video from 2023 were multiple and highly diverse, and illustrate the above-mentioned icons of the beaver and the stereotypical Pole juxtaposed in such a way that their contrast (or ‘interval’) produces humorous effects. Our corpus consisted of 100 items—videos, memes and comments collected from various platforms such as Facebook or other groups devoted to the ‘bober’ meme collections (e.g. Chief Bober, 2024), YouTube, Tik-Tok, and Polish meme aggregators like Kwejk, JBZD, meme.jeja.pl or knowyourmeme. We looked at specific platforms and websites and used search engines to look for the materials by means of the following keywords: bóbr, bober [beaver] combined with words: humor, memy, dowcipy, zabawny [humour, memes, jokes, funny]. We chose these particular items due to their popularity, diversity and the relation to the beaver video. Looking at the multiple examples, we noticed some thematic similarity between particular items, hence we grouped them in the categories that described their common features. The coding was done using the iterative system. We collected the material between May 2024 and September 2025, but the majority of examples come from the year 2024; even though we collected them mainly from the Polish cyberspace, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian meme-makers are strongly present and sometimes equip memes or videos with captions in the Cyrillic. We have tried to make a selection that would be most representative in terms of themes and images, although for the sake of coherence and space we had to drop a number of interesting themes. As a result, we have divided the examples into four categories in order to focus on the hetero-stereotype and auto-stereotype of Poles as reverberating across the Slavdom: 1/ the mutual attitudes of Poles to beavers and 2/ beavers to Poles, 3/ the beaver posing for the Pole with their stereotypical features, and finally 4/ the beaver presented on the symbolic plane. This classification reflects well the discourse structure of the memes: the perceived relationships between narrators and characters as well as their cultural setting. Consequently, the analysis below follows the methodology of qualitative discourse analysis with elements of visual semiotics, illustrating Warburg’s (1892) iconology of intervals.

This study explores the dynamic and essentially irrational nature of colliding images, to use Warburg’s (1892) terms. It shows the way in which stereotypes are interpreted across cultures, and examines the qualities of the beaver video example which have—surprisingly—turned out essential to make it effective and resonant, relatable and comprehensible.

The multiplicity of humorous genres and material inspired by the original video allows us to discuss the phenomena from different points of view. Faced with such a variety, we have proposed four categories in order to focus on the hetero-stereotype and auto-stereotype of Poles as reverberating across the Slavdom: the memetic portrayals of mutual attitudes of Poles to beavers and beavers to Poles, the examples of memes with the beaver impersonating the Poles with their stereotypical features, and finally the beaver presented on the symbolic plane, evoking typical symbols, stereotypically related to Polish culture.

Poles (usually men) come across as callous characters, not caring for beavers, treating them as amusing live toys (especially because beavers are normally rare to see) and reacting emotionally, displaying anger, arrogance and disorderly behaviour, especially when under the influence of alcohol (although affectionate reactions occur as well). Personified beavers are represented as suffering trauma from this treatment, and they in turn impersonate Poles as being drunk, lazy, vulgar and uncaring, breaking the social etiquette, showing ignorance and prejudice as well as pride and self-confidence. This squares with their use of language in memes, which is generally substandard, occasionally incoherent, displaying the features of Bernstein’s restricted code or at least the sloppy speech. The expletives of beavers Poles use, especially kurwa, are symbols of vulgarity and ignorance of speakers of Polish internationally, the emotionality and resilience being the redeeming factors. In fact, Poles may be argued to be seen as ‘our kind of people’ from the perspective of other Slavs, and an explanation of the viral popularity of the beaver memes in other Slavic countries, although this claim does require further verification and a cross-cultural study, particularly in Eastern Europe. All in all, we can clearly confirm the negative stereotypes quoted from Niewiara at the outset: the Poles are seen largely as combative, and quarrelsome, while their positive features are limited perhaps to their pride and excitability.

In all the four categories analysed above the ambivalence of attitudes is present, shaping the love-hate relation of Poles and their beavers. Beavers as highly anthropomorphised animals are perceived in contradictory ways, being at the same time cute and nasty, friendly and aggressive, useful and harmful, innocent and dangerous, slow and dynamic, common and rare. Those oppositions highlighted in the collected material reinforce the incongruous and humorous potential of the beaver figure. Aggressive language, dominated by profanities easily recognised by the whole Slavdom, enriches the humorous effect by its transgressive character.

Warburg used ‘montage-collision’ to create textless collections of images noticing the ‘pathos formulas’ of the body in movement (Michaud 2004). The movements of both the heavy animal and disgracefully tipsy Pole who was chasing him were reinforced by the language and thus inspired the series of humorous comments and started the memeiosis (Attardo, 2023). The discussed video became the anchor starting the process of virality and forming the source of intertextuality, as well as stimulated remixing, mashup, and invention. Using studies pointing out that ‘in environments where the correct course of action is ambiguous, people rely even more heavily on the cues provided by others’, and that ‘people are also more likely to follow the cues of others when the others are a member of their in-group and thus more similar to them’ (Guadagno et al, 2013: 7), we conclude that that virality of the bober video is related to both the similarity of language clues shared by Slavic people and stereotypes known to the audiences. Apart from the sense of ‘emotional contagion’, there is an increasing possibility of social validation by providing participants with knowledge of other participants’ download choices. This implies that being forwarded a video or meme by an in-group member may serve as a signal that the video is appropriate to forward to others (Guadagno et al, 2013: 7). Thus, the multiple signals of appreciation in the comments that accompany the bober video or the memes inspired by it increased its spread and popularity.

By incorporating the features of stereotypical Poles, by behaving in habitual ways and by using symbols typical for Polish culture, the angry, callous, etiquette-breaking, but at the same time ‘our beaver’ becomes part of the Polish community, and simultaneously becomes a recognisable and established symbol of Polishness for the out-groups members.5