Bike Fall Meme Template

The comic is titled “Bâton-Roue” (“wheel stick”) and was created by French illustrator Corentin Penloup in 2011. Know Your Meme documents the original comic’s 2012 Reddit repost and a major 2015 Tumblr edit, and describes later remixes as labeling the rider, the stick, and the fall to show self-destructive actions. The common joke is a person or group causing a predictable problem through an avoidable choice, then suffering or sometimes blaming someone else. A fourth donation-request panel exists in some edits, but it is not part of this exact three-panel image. The CSV attributes the comic to “Lala / Pulpfriction / Lalatina”; the researched sources instead identify Corentin Penloup, so the draft avoids repeating that unsupported attribution.

An uncaptioned three-panel comic on white paper. In the top panel, a cyclist rides along and holds a stick beside the front wheel. In the middle panel, he puts the stick into the spokes. In the bottom panel, the bike flips and he lands on the ground. The effective caption regions follow those panels: slot 1 in the upper panel’s open area, slot 2 beside the wheel in the middle panel, and slot 3 across the bottom panel’s open grass.

Slot 1 (top panel) identifies the rider, person, group, goal, or initial situation. Slot 2 (middle panel) names the deliberate or avoidable action—the “stick in the spokes”—that undermines that goal. Slot 3 (bottom panel) states the predictable failure or consequence caused by that action. Make the causal chain unmistakable and keep the third caption tied to the first two. The tone can be self-deprecating, ironic, or critical; do not add a fourth-panel donation plea because this exact template has only three panels.

1. Top panel: name the rider/person/group and its goal or starting situation.
2. Middle panel: label the avoidable action or self-sabotaging choice that disrupts the goal.
3. Bottom panel: state the predictable failure or consequence caused by slot 2.

• a team undermines its own stated goal with an avoidable shortcut
• a person repeats a known counterproductive habit and faces the result
• an organization creates the very obstacle it then complains about
• a self-inflicted work or project failure that follows from a clear decision

• Do not omit the self-sabotaging choice in slot 2; a random outside obstacle changes the meme’s causal joke.
• Do not make slot 3 unrelated to the middle-panel action; it should be the consequence of that choice.
• Do not make the person’s goal or the avoidable action so vague that the causal link is hard to follow.
• Do not add a fourth-panel plea or donation caption; the inspected template contains three caption slots.
• Do not attribute the original comic to Lala/Pulpfriction/Lalatina; the sources identify Corentin Penloup.