Much Ado about Planking

In 2011, something called “planking” briefly took over the Internet (Figures 1 and 2). Before declining in popularity, this global meme would provoke arrests in Wisconsin, inspire legislation in the Philippines, stir accusations of racism on Twitter, and kill a man in Aus-tralia. Know Your Meme helpfully defines planking as “lying face down with arms to the sides in unusual public spaces.”1 The site’s image gallery includes people planking on desks, chairs, escalators, phone booths, goal-posts, even the back of a whale. For me, the photos bring new meaning to Benedick’s complaint, in Much Ado about Nothing, that he has been “misused” by Beatrice “past the endurance of a block”; he likely means the chopping block— the solid piece of wood “used for various opera-tions,” according to the OED, such as chopping meat, cutting firewood, or beheading the condemned — an object with a notably high tolerance for use and abuse.2 Benedick identifies here as a thing, but even more impor-tantly, as a thing among other things — “an oak but with one green leaf on it would have answer’d her. My very visor began to assume life, and scold with her” — each pushed past its limit, compelled into intimate exchange with Beatrice and with each other.