Planking Meme: What Happened, From Craze to Owling

Planking meme, what happened in short: planking was a photo craze in which people lay face down, arms at their sides, stiff as a board, somewhere unexpected, then posted the picture online. It grew out of England’s “Lying Down Game,” took the name “planking” in Australia around 2008, and exploded worldwide in 2011. A fatal balcony fall in Brisbane in May 2011 brought police warnings and global headlines, which spread it further. Spin-offs like owling followed within weeks, and by 2013 searches for it had collapsed, according to Inverse.

So the answer to “why did we all lie on things?” is less about the pose than about the platform. Planking was one of the first memes built for the Facebook photo feed, and it behaved exactly the way that feed rewarded.

What planking actually was

The rules were simple enough to fit in one sentence. You lay face down, legs straight, arms pinned to your sides, and someone photographed you balanced on something that made no sense: a bench, a mailbox, a shopping cart handle, a car roof. The photo went on Facebook. That was the whole game.

What made it work was the gap between effort and payoff. A plank cost nothing, needed no skill, no editing software and no camera beyond a phone, and anyone could judge whether a given plank was funny. The only way to compete was location. A plank on a kitchen table was ordinary. A plank across two chairs in an office, or on top of a statue, got comments.

That competitive escalation is the key to the whole story, and it is also where the trend eventually went wrong.

Where planking came from: a timeline

Nobody owns the origin, and several people have claimed it. Every date below names its source, and where sources conflict we say so.

One date deserves a caveat. GOOD magazine’s December 2011 history of the trend puts the Brisbane death on March 15, 2011. ABC News in Australia reported it on May 16, 2011, the day after, and Wikipedia gives May 15. The contemporaneous reporting supports May.

Why planking spread in 2011

Planking had existed under other names for years. What changed in 2011 was the combination of three things.

It was built for the Facebook photo feed

By 2011, Facebook had become a default place to share phone photos with friends. A plank was the perfect unit of content for that feed: instantly readable in a thumbnail, funny without a caption, and easy to answer with your own photo. Nicholas Carah, a new media researcher at the University of Queensland, told ABC News at the time that Facebook works like “a reputation economy,” and that “with something like planking, the more outrageous the photo, the more people are likely to comment.” He added that “the architecture of how we communicate with each other on Facebook blends itself to amplifying these types of things.”

That is the mechanism in plain terms. Comments and shares rewarded escalation, and escalation meant riskier locations.

Famous people legitimized it

Once athletes and celebrities joined in, planking stopped being a niche joke. Williams’s on-field plank in March 2011 put it in front of Australian sports audiences. Inverse later listed Ellen Page, Kristen Bell and Dwight Howard among the famous plankers, and GOOD named Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Each new famous plank was also a news story, and each news story recruited more plankers.

The crackdown worked as advertising

This is the part most retellings skip. Before the fatal fall, Queensland police had charged a Gladstone man for planking on a police car, according to ABC News. After the death, Deputy Police Commissioner Ross Barnett warned that planking “seven storeys or on top of a set of traffic lights, or on a set of railway lines” was not only potentially illegal but put people in “significant danger.”

Every warning became a headline, and every headline spread the trend. ABC News (Australia) reported on May 16, 2011 (read September 25, 2026) that Carah called the result “counter-intuitive”: “Attempts to control phenomenons (sic) like this inevitably amplify it… The police were trying to make a stand but counter-intuitively it gave it much more publicity.” Meme.com’s history of the trend says the main Australian planking Facebook page grew from 116,000 to 145,000 fans after Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s public safety warning; we could not trace that figure to a primary report, so treat it as that site’s account.

The Brisbane fall and what it changed

On May 15, 2011, a 20-year-old man fell to his death from a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane. Police said he had been attempting to plank on the railing, according to Wikipedia and ABC News. It was the first death widely attributed to the trend, and it moved planking from the entertainment pages to the news pages worldwide.

It did not stop the trend. ABC News spoke to the founder of a local planking group the same week, who said, “The Brisbane Planking Association is all about planking smart and planking safe,” and urged, “Think before you plank, and don’t drink and plank.” Carah cautioned that “it is hard to say that planking is ultimately responsible.”

What the fall did change was the tone. Planking went from harmless silliness to something police and politicians had opinions about, and memes rarely survive becoming a safety topic for long. The safest reading of the story is the one police gave at the time: the pose itself was harmless, and the danger came from the competition over where to do it.

Owling, batmanning and the “-ing” era

Planking’s most lasting legacy is a template: take a strange pose, add “-ing,” and photograph it somewhere unexpected. In the second half of 2011, the internet ran that template again and again.

• Owling. Crouch on a railing or ledge, hands near your feet, and stare into the distance like a perched owl. Wikipedia dates the first documented owling photo to a Reddit post on July 11, 2011. GOOD’s December 2011 history describes it as “a woman crouched on a staircase handrail with her arms by the side of her legs.”
• Batmanning. Hang upside down by your feet from a bar or frame, arms flat against your body.
• Teapotting. Bend your arms into a handle and spout. Wikipedia credits it to teachers at Mortlake College in Australia.
• Tebowing. Kneel on one knee with your head resting on your fist, after NFL quarterback Tim Tebow’s on-field prayer. Wikipedia’s article on Tebow says the habit, “becoming known as ‘Tebowing’,” made him “a cultural phenomenon.”
• Dufnering. Sit slumped against a wall with a blank stare, after golfer Jason Dufner, which Wikipedia says took off when Rory McIlroy tweeted an imitation.

Owling, in particular, arrived as an explicit reply to planking, which tells you how quickly the original had become old news. The template kept producing offshoots after planking itself had peaked, and the same “strange pose in a strange place” logic shows up in later photo and video challenges.

Planking meme: what happened after 2011

Planking faded for the same reasons it spread, in reverse.

First, escalation hit a ceiling. Once the funniest planks required dangerous heights, the ordinary version felt tame, and the extreme version carried real legal and physical risk.

Second, it went mainstream. When politicians’ families, sports stars and brands took part, the trend lost the in-group feeling that made it fun to spread. Wikipedia notes that the son of New Zealand’s then prime minister, John Key, posted a planking photo on May 29, 2011.

Third, the feed moved on. Owling was captioned on Reddit as a replacement for planking. Inverse’s 2015 postmortem put it bluntly: interest in planking had “tanked” by 2013.

Fourth, the name drew criticism. GOOD’s history notes that The Washington Post examined “possible racist elements of planking, tracing its roots back to the ‘planking’ method used on ships to transport slaves.”

The platform shift matters too. Planking belonged to the era when still photos on Facebook drove casual sharing. As short video grew on apps like Vine, many memes became moving rather than still. Our history of what happened to Vine covers that app’s rise and shutdown.

Where planking stands now

Planking survives as nostalgia. It turns up in throwback posts about early 2010s internet trends, and the word itself is now more likely to mean the core exercise at a gym than a photo meme.

Its real legacy is structural. It was one of the first worldwide memes to spread mainly through a social network’s photo feed rather than through forums or email, and it showed how quickly a harmless joke could escalate when the reward was comments. It also showed that official warnings can amplify the thing they warn against, a pattern that has repeated with many challenges since.

If you are tracing how the social web of that period worked, planking sits alongside the features and platforms that shaped it. Our look at Facebook features that no longer exist covers the platform planking lived on, and our guide to the old web platforms that shaped the internet, then vanished puts it in wider context.

FAQ

What was the planking meme?

Planking was a 2011 photo craze in which people lay face down, stiff and straight with arms at their sides, in unusual places, and shared the photos online, mostly on Facebook. It grew out of an English trend called the Lying Down Game.

Who invented planking?

No one conclusively. Wikipedia lists precursors going back to 1983, the Lying Down Game started in England in 1997, and the name “planking” came from Australia around 2008. Several people have publicly claimed credit.

Did someone die planking?

Yes. In May 2011, a 20-year-old man died after falling from a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane, Australia, while reportedly attempting to plank on the railing, according to ABC News and Wikipedia.

What is owling?

Owling was a follow-up photo fad from July 2011: crouching on a railing or ledge with hands near your feet, staring into the distance like an owl. Wikipedia dates the first documented owling photo to a Reddit post on July 11, 2011.

When did planking stop being popular?

Planking peaked in 2011 and declined quickly afterward. Inverse reported in 2015 that search interest had largely collapsed by 2013.