Walk the human plank: pop culture phenomenon hits high school

Passing time has gone far beyond watching paint dry or watching grass grow. “Planking” has turned into a pop cultural phenomenon.

“You can’t help but want to try it out,” senior Rachel Le said. “It is very spontaneous and it gives us something to do no matter where we are.”

To execute a plank, the planker must lay expressionless on his or her stomach and have his fingers and toes pointing back. After the picture is taken and the plank is done, the planker must name their plank and upload it to Facebook or another online social media outlet.

Over summer, junior Samantha Cheng made her Facebook profile picture one of herself planking on the Bruin in UCLA late at night.

Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon claimed to have invented this “lying down game” while traveling in Europe and becoming bored of their simple poses back in 2000. It was later shortened to planking in 2009 after wide popularity in Australia.

Now, all across the world, people are planking in all kinds of places and taking pictures of their various planks, and comparing their planks to see which ones look the coolest.

Planking has become so popular that even celebrities such as NBA star Dwight Howard, pop star Justin Bieber, and Master chef Gordon Ramsey have posted pictures of themselves planking.

Planking has become a world-wide craze mainly because of its relative simplicity. All it requires is a good setting to plank in, and somebody to take the picture.

“I think planking is really popular because it’s so dumb,” Le said. “You can’t help but laugh because it looks so ridiculous.”

A good place to plank is usually a random spot that no one would ever think of stopping at, according to Le.

After being exposed to planking online, more people have been tempted to try it for themselves, either out of curiosity or boredom.

“I did not want to do it at first,” Le said. “I was actually peer pressured because my friends think it’s really funny, so sometimes we just do it for laughs.”

However, planking can be dangerous in some occurrences. In one incident in Australia, while 20-year-old Acton Beale was trying to plank on the seventh story floor of an apartment building, he fell off the balcony and died.

“I first saw planking on the news, after hearing that people died from doing it,” Cheng said. “This made me curious. My friend and I wanted to do something memorable at our summer camp, so we decided to take a risk for a good picture.”

“When I was laying face down on the ground,” Le said, “I was thinking that I couldn’t believe I was doing this and how I hoped no one could see me.”

Planking pictures, however, are not limited to only solo shots. There are planks such as the double plank and the synchronized plank in which multiple people are either planking on each other, or provide the support for another person to plank on.

The success of planking has inspired other people to create their own original poses, which include “batmanning,” “owling” and “teapotting.”

Batmanning involves hanging upside down from one’s feet; owling is a variation of planking in which a person squats like an owl; and teapotting is another variation in which a person acts out a teapot in reference to the children’s song “I’m a Little Teapot.”

“All of these new planking trends are really dumb,” Cheng said. “However, they make for really good pictures, which makes it fun.”