Countryballs

Countryballs, also known as Polandball, is a geopolitical satirical art style, genre, and internet meme, predominantly used in online comics strips in which countries or political entities are personified as balls with eyes without pupils, decorated with their national flags. Comics feature the characters in various scenarios, generally poking fun at national stereotypes, international relations, and historical events, with them moving about by walking or jumping. Other common features in Countryball strips include non-English countries speaking in broken English—with vocabularies of their national languages included—political incorrectness, and black comedy. Strips are generally created using Microsoft Paint or more advanced tools, often made to intentionally look crudely drawn.

Countryballs date back to an August 2009 incident on drawball.com, where thousands of Polish internet users swarmed the website to transform the illustration into the Polish flag (a literal "Poland ball"); however, the creator of the modern Countryballs format is often credited to Falco, a British user of the German imageboard Krautchan.net who created the first strips to ridicule Polish internet troll Wojak, who used broken English on the same board. Falco created the strips using Paint in September 2009, where they gained popularity among other users on the board, particularly Russians. The meme gained further notoriety following the death of Lech Kaczyński, president of Poland, in the Smolensk air disaster in April 2010.

Countryballs continue to be popular on the internet, with the Facebook community reaching over 215,000 members by July 2015, and several other communities being created on Reddit, VK, Telegram, YouTube, Twitter. It has also been the subject of research by various institutions, as well as positive and negative commentary for both their simplistic and offensive nature, with some feeling they could allow readers to learn about unknown events. Various video games and alternate history works have been based on the meme.