Photocopy butt series#

Michael Scott, though he remains an immature boy-man, is more in tune with the tide of culture and what impressively stupid things you can do with your iPhone. Only lame-O’s are amused by what is lame because they don’t realize it’s lame.

What I want to point to is that only Kevins find photocopying your butt funny now. I don’t mean to dismiss the Kevins of the world and what they personally find funny. Technology, however, forced him to leave the act behind. See, there was a time when Michael Scott would have found it funny. The only character on The Office who would take a seat on the Xerox is Kevin, which he did in Season 2, episode 10 (the Christmas party). Perhaps our most recent bellwether – though he lives only in reruns now – is Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, that innovator of immaturity, inappropriateness, and the poster boy for that’s-what-she-said humor. After trolling through even the tamer parts of the Web’s seedy side, you might conclude that, for those of a youthful nature, one of the most difficult things to do is abstain from exposing yourself for documentation. There was once a time when a photocopier might have played a role in such an experience. What the hell’s wrong with being stupid once in a while? Does everything you do always have to be sensible? Haven’t you ever thrown water balloons off a roof? When you were a little kid didn’t you ever sprinkle Ivory flakes on the living room floor because you wanted to make it snow in July? Didn’t you ever get really shitfaced and maybe make a complete fool of yourself and still have an excellent time? As freshman Walter Gibson (played by John Cusack in the 1985 film The Sure Thing) said: It’s part of growing up and also part of not wanting to grow up. Asking someone to do it for an art project sort of took the fun out of it, I suppose.Īcts of harmless immaturity were/are inevitable for most of us. Immature acts of this kind often require spontaneity. I never made the book, partly because I couldn’t convince other friends to take the risk.

To have made copies would have put too much distance from the act. Each page would have been an artifact of the experience.

I would have used staples for the binding, and there would have been exactly one-no copies. It was a good art-project idea, that book. Immediately, I wanted to compile a collection of all my friends’ rears, made at the cost of potential embarrassment in a momentarily vacant corner of the library. Inspiration struck after two of my friends returned from the library each with a photocopy of his bare butt. In 1987, when I was a sophomore at Kent State, I had an idea for a book. And he would have crushed the machine, the table, the whatever. If he had gone this route, it no doubt would have been Chris Farley who sat. What Schneider never did – the same Rob Schneider who not only starred in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo but who also has been hit in the crotch more than any actor in the history of cinema – was have someone sit on the copy machine. When Sting was in the sketch it went something like this: The sketch consisted of him saying “makin’ copies” and riffing on the person’s name. The office copy machine was near Richard’s desk.

Photocopy butt series#

In the 1990’s there was a series of inane yet wonderfully funny Saturday Night Live sketches where Rob Schneider played Richard, the Makin’ Copies guy. The act has lost the relevance it once had and is now stuck in the dead waters of pop culture history. If lameness is the Horse Latitudes of pop culture, then photocopying your butt is adrift in that windless place between being cleverly immature and not being stupid enough.