Ain't No Lie: The Sport of Kings

Magisterial sleight of hand: this post, like the last, contains a king in the title, but this post, like the last, will have very little to do with King's or Cambridge. Nor will it have much of sport to recommend it. If you feel cheated, you may read all about the phenomenon here. Looks a worthwhile activity.

No, I would fain talk to you about the more specific counterculture of planking - or, as that hyperlink you've just followed would have it, the 'Lying Down Game' (henceforth LDG). Now, up to this point I've considered myself a relatively cosmopolitan citizen: broad traveller, crisscrossing from the richest to the poorest, and good hunks of residential time chewed at opposite ends of the earth, such that I can now verify through autopsy that Greenwich meantime is not a daily, temporary revival of childhood hostilities. But more and more I am finding that the greatest comic joys - those born from reality, no less - are being introduced to me via Skype conversations with my parents: particularly my dad, who has always been an avid follower of current affairs, but is only now really discovering how many current affairs there are in the world when he has infinite time to peruse them. Just envious dad, happy retirement. Anyway, as the parents filled in the details surrounding the current crisis in Australia, punctuating the story with mingled ridicule and condemnation, laughter slowly boiled over within me. Not that brief-remark-on-an-amusing-quirk laughter; that heavy, chest-heaving, open-mouthed, physiological hilarity. Yes, I have a short wire for the laughter bomb. But for some reason, this topical anecdote, that probably just made the cut in my dad's rigorous filtering process for what gets into our Skype conversations, really got under my skin.

There was an element of stubborn nostalgia at first, certainly, intensified by my present conditions of life: I'm in a country where the appetite for Australian stereotypes is bottomless. The way to every surly Englishman's heart is to tell him that you've met Harold from Neighbours in the most parodically Australian accent you can muster - admittedly easier if the parody is self-parody. Near three years in a land and the land must leave its mark on you, by now a bruised and unwashable suggestion of Britishness. And so I'm sure that an element of the laughter was the condescending spring of the colonist's brain: 'Haha! Only in the antipodes would they be daft enough to kill themselves by planking on a seventh-story balcony!' These myths are the grease and oil of empire, legitimating British exploitation of Australian resources such as sun: those convicts are so busy lying down in high places that they'll never notice how sunburnt we are. Just for the record, Brits - and now I speak as a native of the land downunder - we always plank with one eye open.

There are few feelings more pleasing than the identity safehouse that is the fulfillment of a stereotype - if the stereotype is positive, of course. I take it as a grand compliment when someone applies 'Australian' to me as a fully-fledged adjective over here; it is usually an economical code for 'you can talk to someone for ten minutes with only five awkward silences or less'. But there was more to my planking moment than an affection for my country's celebrated buffoonery, and a humming contentment with life taking on the square dimensions of art. There was something about LDG that transcended taxonomies - something universal. Having said that, I'm not confident that the female half (well, majority) of the human race would find it as funny. And there you go: of course a man would say it's universal when it's not. At least this paragraph proves that the pleasure of the stereotype extends to gender. QED. I'm a man, and thus a scientist.

I shall return to the masculine principle of straight narrative and get back on track. So, there was something about this phenomenon that instantly struck a chord in the (still substantial) juvenile part of my soul. It took me back to my early career in the prank (of which the plank must be a sub-genre): filling up a plastic bottle with water, dog-poo and flowers, putting it on a neighbour's doorstep, ringing the doorbell, yelling 'Patak's Express' and running for the hills. There has always been something inherently thrilling - and comic - about the awkward situation. The idea that someone, that unsuspecting butt, will be at the other end, desperately trying to make the situation fit the laws of social logic; and you, looking on from afar, in no better position beyond the fact that you know the situation can't be fitted to any logic, and the universe, for that one moment, is completely, wonderfully, side-splittingly, random. Hence, during the brief efflorescence of practical joke shows on television, the emphasis on the reactions of innocent bystanders walking past and puzzling over the spectacle. The beauty of the practical joke is that there is nothing to understand, nothing to be 'in on' - apart from the recognition that the thing in front of you is a joke. An illusion more potent than any form of art. But the plank is morally superior to this, for, in its noblest forms, it has no real targets. It is absolutely passive, absolutely inert: you lie down in the most ridiculous location you can think of, and that is that. People only laugh when they exhale with recognition: Ahh, planking I see before me, hehe, nice one. But happiest were those plankers in the early days of the game, before it was an international sensation, who hooked their audience for the briefest of moments before the audience got on with its day. The most lazy, barren, stationary form of street theatre possible: so funny precisely because there is nothing to see.

Apart from its charming subversion of the conventions of practical joking through its understated refusal to perform any action whatsoever, planking also brought back memories of how funny raw physical comedy - slapstick in the pejorative - can be. A (female, for the record) student of mine once suggested that men are funnier because they are freer and sillier with their bodies. While I snapped back that men weren't necessarily funnier, and if they were, that was because humour is deeply implicated with power, and men set the terms for what constitutes funny because they set the terms for the world, and jokes are written by the victor dontcha know - I had to admit to myself that men, in my own experience, do play with their bodies much more (publicly). As an alumnus of a boy's school, I can pick a flashback to any given day in uniform among those deodorised pubescent rats: it will inevitably involve visible arse-cheeks, someone (usually me) doing a smelly fart, and, if we're lucky, a scrotum in a mousetrap. The body was a prime site on which the eternal bid for laughs took place. There is still a (majority?) boyish segment of me that finds unsophisticated physical comedy some of the most distilled humour out there. Even Monty Python - that enigmatic, ever-so-British band of genii - deemed it fit to dip into the comedy of arms and legs from time to time: witness the famous Ministry of Silly Walks.

The Art of Planking plays into this purest of corporeal humour. And one of the other prominent theatres of male bodily awkwardness is, of course, the modern day dance-floor. As a white man, I gave up on aspirations to the merest semblance of rhythm a long time ago. But, as I launch my repetitive moves into infinity and struggle to squeeze any juice out of my stiff German hips, I can't help finding this space one of the most intriguing in western society (G-real, know you've written stuff on this, so jump in and wipe the floor with me if you like). The dance-floor is a realm in which most guys - usually so in control of the comedy of bodies - feel absolutely powerless. They are not sure what their limbs are supposed to be doing. I may be extrapolating unwisely here; but many men I lock eyes with in a club scream to me silently of a world in which people could listen to music without feeling the social compulsion to motorise their appendages. And so one night, nauseous with constant oppression at the hands of the agile, I decided to take a stand. By lying down. I was drunk, and decided that the best move I could pull off in the middle of a cleared circle was to lie down and pretend to be asleep. I had found my niche. But what I didn't realise was that my niche had, in a broad sense, already been found, and had found me. I was unknowingly participating in a venerable sport which had been around more than ten years. I was planking the dance-floor.

So I must admit that part of the plank's special appeal lies (yes) in my wistful longing to have invented it. So, perhaps, with all things piss funny on this earth. To stiffen a little further, on fifth thought the humour of the plank reminded me of Henri Bergson's work on the comic; I haven't had much to do with humour theory (despite my predisposition to the cack), but this French man seems to come up a lot in the little I have read. Far as I can make head or tail of the philosopher's jests (and could you ever write a theory of humour that didn't take the piss out of itself?), much laughter is induced by the recognition of human bodies acting like mechanical entities, taking on the appearance of automata. And what could be more robotic than the plank - than a body, customarily the seat of free movement, suddenly transformed into a thing that doesn't work, doesn't do anything? Complete stasis is the degree zero of repetition. The plank thus teaches us a useful lesson: death is the funniest thing that a human can do.

After swearing solemnly to myself and my parents that I would never plank, I got drunk and I tried. I now have a small wound on my forehead. And though, after that disaster, I will never let the animal out of the cage again, I can't bring myself to join the chorus of moral hysteria. A good physical joke is an irresistible force of joy, and an injury inflicted in jest from the other side of the world is, if nothing else, the sign of a good physical joke. The joke is on me: on my neanderthal forehead that has evolved, or refused to evolve, specifically for a good planking.