A standard juvenile office prank, where the subject drops his trousers, plants his rear end against the glass of a photocopy machine and presses start. Hilarious!Don't Try This at Home, kids. See Truth in Television below to find out why.
Shot for Shot Remake for a Western Office Supplier. But do note that this is a commercial for printing paper. The girl in this version climbs on top of the machine because the paper tray is empty...
Re-used wholesale for the UK launch of the product, with a locally-relevant box comped in.
A Public Service Announcement by anti-smoking group Stand, where a guy photocopies his butt (with his pants still on) and posts it above an ashtray with the caption "I don't like seeing yours either." "Costs a buck a week, but it's worth it!"
She-Hulk was fired from a law firm for crushing the copier while making photocopies of her butt. She asks how they knew it was her. Turns out it was a color copier.
Fantastic Four #527: Ben Grimm experiences a significant windfall, and rushes off to do this, so he can send the picture to Bill Gates (The Other B.G.). Bill wonders why the Fantastic Four sent him a picture of the Grand Canyon.
The Thing's Mego toy counterpart does this, and similar pranks, on a regular basis in Twisted Toyfare Theater.
Monsters vs. Aliens has a scanner to Mission Control only admitting someone after scanning their eyes, hands, ears, elbows, and yup...dropping their pants so it can scan their butt.
Gru's Minions are seen doing this to amuse themselves in one scene from Despicable Me.
The Spirit: Sand prints a copy of her rear, The Spirit retrieves it, immediately knowing that it's her "perfect ass". Considering the last time he saw her was when she was 12, that's particularly squicky.
And then he shows it to every bellboy at every swanky hotel in Central City to find where she's staying. A few complimentary comments later, it works. The one that recognizes it, incidentally? A midget.
In 40 Days And 40 Nights one of the protagonist's female coworkers does this to try to make the protagonist lose his bet of not having sex (or masturbating) for 40 days.
Tina was handing out pictures of her butt she'd copied at the Christmas Party in Scrooged.
Literature
The Laundry short story "Overtime" deals with Bob pulling Christmas watch duty in the aftermath of the office party. The first sign that something's wrong is when he goes to the photocopier, finds a few cheek copies, and realizes one of them shows the thorax of a giant cockroach...
Monk goes to an office undercover, his deductive skills are noticed by his co-workers who ask him to identify the photocopy of a pair of Caucasian buttcheeks pinned to the bulletin board.
An episode of TLC had a patient who had photocopied her butt, and broken the glass. Her only response (holding up the photocopy) "Does my bum look big in this?"
In the Bones episode "The Man in the Fallout Shelter", Angela implores Brennan to come to the office Christmas party to stop her from repeating what she did last Christmas party. "...it took me WEEKS to collect all those copies... Friends don't let friends photocopy their butts"
An episode of Heroes has an interesting example when Hiro attempts to prevent the suicide of a co-worker incited by a Humiliation Conga started by, you guessed it, drunkenly photocopying his butt during an office party. We never see Hiro actually prevent it, however, since history refuses to change and the co-worker somehow finds ways to embarrass himself by doing the same thing at a different time (Hiro's friend Ando even refers to the poor sap as "The guy with the famous butt.") After about 47 failed attempts, Hiro just gives in and manages to talk the guy out of it.
On an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Hal frets over meeting his new boss because he never makes a good first impression. The scene cuts to previous disastrous introductions including one in which Hal is caught by a new boss copying his backside while being cheered on by his co-workers.
A unique variant comes up in the Japanese Soramimi Hour, dedicated to Japanese Mondegreens of songs from all over the world. Apparently the Japanese have misheard the line "tea, tea and coffee" (from "You're So Great" by Blur) as "Chinchin Copy", whereupon a quickie music video shows a man buck naked and lying face down on the copier. There should be no need to translate "chinchin" at this point...
On Mock the Week, the game "Scenes We'd Like To See" throws up the suggestion "Things You Don't Want To Hear In The Workplace":
On Boy Meets World when Shawn and Cory are working in an office mailroom Shawn starts to do this before Cory stops him.
In the Torchwood episode "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang", Jack apparently loves the strange quirks of office life, including cheek copies.
Deconstructed on the A Thousand Ways To Die story, "X-Mess Carol": A drunk intern at an office party decides to photocopy her butt for her boss during a Christmas party as a gift to him. The glass breaks out from under her and electrocutes her to death.
An episode of Brazilian sitcom Os Normais has a woman photocopying her butt and sending to an executive, claiming it's her curriculum (she gets hired, of course, and becomes his mistress). Later the executive's wife and the show's protagonist have a discussion involving how the butt is altered in said pictures (including the woman sitting on a glass table!).
"Weird Al" Yankovic's "Your Horoscope For Today" offers Leos the following advice: "Now is not a good time to photocopy your butt and staple it to your boss's face, oh no!" Which rather begs the question of whether there is a good time to do so.
Occurs in the music video of Britney Spears's "Womanizer".
In the early 90s, The Simpsons released an album of blues songs. In one of them, "Look at All These Idiots", sung by Mr. Burns, he comments on his employees' "Xeroxing their buttocks".
The Fiery Furnaces "I'm Gonna Run".
I slit my wrists with my Swingline
Copied myself 500 times
The dimwitted protagonist in the music video of Lene Alexandra’s "My Boobs Are OK" makes several cheek copies.
Mentioned in the Jeff MacDougall song "Bekcy The Office Party Drunk Girl"
One Bloom County strip features Steve Dallas and Opus the Penguin working at the town newspaper. Steve asks what the mysterious pages are in the copier, and Opus suggests that it may be loaves of bread, deflated volleyballs... or one attractive posterior.
An unusual example in On The Fastrack: Meg the Cyberdog did it to produce binary code in a shape that confused Art.
You can do this in Duke Nukem 3 D: Atomic Edition. On the level "Pigsty", there are several photocopy machines and if you step on them, an image of Duke's rear end comes out. (He's got a tattoo with a lady's name on there.)
A Flash game called Slackman, set in your office, allows you to, among other things, do this for lots of points.
Salem does this in one of the trailers for Army Of Two.
The Spanish Geek Trip Tira Ecol subverts this: Main character Nano tries the prank in a Microsoft Surface. The system crashes and displays a Blue Screen.
This is Bart Simpson's signature prank, culminating in putting the copies into prayer books and handing them out to the parishioners.
In "The Debarted", Skinner foils Bart's prank by putting Super Glue on the photocopy machine and having Bart be the unwilling living model for an art class.
One episode featured Bart being caught between doing an assignment, and being tempted to take advantage of the free copies on the machine at the library by doing a Cheek Copy. He prays for guidance, and his shorts fall down. Naturally, he runs into the copy room, and the next thing the audience sees is the green glow of the copy machine.
Another moment has him reveal that merely reciting the teacher's copy machine code makes his butt feel warm.
In the Treehouse of Horror story where the world plunges into the technological apocalypse that was thought to have happened because of the Y2K virus (thanks to Homer not updating the computers at the nuclear plant), Nelson breaks into school to photocopy his butt. Unfortunately, he does this while the machines begin to go haywire, and Nelson gets sucked into the machine.
Parodied in Ed Edd N Eddy, when Johnny gives Nazz a picture of... a wooden board, much to her bewilderment. He quickly explains: "Plank photocopied his butt!"
As with pretty much every juvenile prank imaginable, this shows up in Beavis and Butt-Head, on the episode "Temporary Insanity."
Butt-Head: Huh huh. I'm enlarging my butt.
An entire episode revolved around this. While trying to copy his butt, Beavis ends up falling through the glass. Soon the fire department is called in to get him out with a local news crew covering the story. They're worried that his femoral artery may be cut, meaning he could bleed out if they get him out. Butt-head tries to activate the machine (wanting to see his "female artery") which makes him pop out. Later, with the machine fixed and Beavis' butt stitched up, he wonders what his stitches look like. Butt-head suggests that he use the copier and he does—and of course, falls through again.
Cow and Chicken play with the school's photocopier in "Bad Chicken" — The photocopy of Chicken's wattle, at first sight at least, is disturbing — and again with the photocopier in dad's office in "The Full Mounty".
My Gym Partner's A Monkey exaggerates Cheek Copy a bit: Jake Spidermonkey sees a photocopier in Principal Pixiefrog's office and makes good use of it. When he's done with his butt, he's still not satisfied. So, he proceeds to plant his face on the glass instead, which gains him some very sore red eyes later on.
A subtle example from Futurama: Fry has the code for paradox-correcting time travel tatoo'd on his buttock, for no reason. A later episode has a man traveling back in time to prevent Richard Nixon from being re-elected. He does so by reading from a certain grainy photocopy...
Hey Arnold!! shows one episode where the rather immature Harold Bergman is copying his butt (pants down and all) at the library (while Arnold is actually doing research on school rules) They are later seen running out of the library as the angry librarian is yelling"Never come back again!"
Just remember, kids, you're putting some highly sensitive body parts on top of fragile glass, beneath which are moving metal parts and electrical wiring. And keep in mind you may not be the first.
Also, any copies acquired by your coworkers may be used in ways detrimental to your promotion prospects, though if your line manager can recognize you in one then they probably weren't that great to start with.
The Mega Book of Useless Information says: "Over 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their bottoms."
Unfortunately, that's a lie.
There is actually a sign in many high school copy rooms specifically telling students not to photocopy their butts. The hilarious part is that the reason they give is because it wastes toner.
For the ultimate office prank, make enough copies that you can tape them end to end (so to speak) in a chain that you can then feed into a fax machine, closing the loop as it feeds: enter the fax number for someone you don't like, and you've just sent them an infinite series of butts. Or at least, wasted all their toner. You'll need about half-a-dozen copies to pull this off successfully without complications.
Subverted in a security tape that went viral. The man was so heavy that he broke the glass when he sat on the copier and fell into the machine.
