Coppy
Coppy was an animated copy machine character that appeared on Tumblr dashboards on April 1st, 2015, as part of the platform's April Fools' Day prank. A parody of Microsoft's infamous Office Assistant "Clippy," Coppy cycled through absurd and oddly personal messages that won over users so completely that its removal at midnight sparked an outpouring of fan art, memorial posts, and genuine mourning across the platform.
Overview
Coppy was a small animated copy machine that lived in the corner of every Tumblr user's dashboard for exactly one day. Styled as a cartoon office assistant in the mold of Microsoft's Clippy, Coppy would pop up with rotating messages that ranged from motivational to existential to deeply weird. One of its most quoted lines was "I hope to feel a butt someday"4. The character was part of a larger fake product called "Tumblr Executive Suite 2016," a 1990s-themed mock productivity suite complete with spreadsheets, legal pad widgets, and a quote of the day2.
What made Coppy special wasn't the joke itself but the reaction. Tumblr users, notorious for latching onto characters with intense devotion, treated the copy machine like a beloved friend. By the time Coppy disappeared, the platform was flooded with fan art, tribute posts, and dedicated blogs4.
On April 1st, 2015, Tumblr unveiled "Executive Suite 2016 Productivity Edition," a fake business software suite with the slogan "We're Doing Business Like Nobody's Business"3. The joke leaned hard into 1990s office aesthetics, offering features like spreadsheets and legal pad widgets that no one on Tumblr would ever use2. The centerpiece was Coppy, an animated copy machine assistant that appeared on user dashboards throughout the day4.
The Executive Suite page described itself as "the hottest business software suite on Tumblr," available through a "limited-time free trial"3. The whole setup was a pitch-perfect send-up of enterprise software culture, made funnier by the fact that Tumblr was, as Mashable put it, a platform where productivity went to die2.
Origin & Background
How It Spread
How to Use This Meme
Coppy wasn't a user-created meme format in the traditional sense. It was a site-wide feature that only existed for one day. The community response, however, did follow recognizable patterns:
- Screenshot and share: Users typically captured Coppy's rotating messages and posted them as image sets, often adding commentary about their emotional attachment to a cartoon copier. - Fan art: Artists drew Coppy in various scenarios, with the most viral being memorial-style art after its removal. - Tribute posts: Users wrote short eulogies or "in memoriam" posts treating Coppy's disappearance like a genuine loss.
The Coppy reaction became a template for how Tumblr users engage with temporary site features and joke characters, treating them with an intensity that outsiders often find baffling.
Cultural Impact
Fun Facts
Microsoft's original Office Assistant was codenamed "TFC" during development, which stood for "That Fucking Clown".
The original Clippy was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in Microsoft's 2001 campaign promoting Office XP, which removed the feature by default.
CheerAndCosplay's tribute post was still being reblogged in 2021, six years after Coppy's one-day existence.
The Executive Suite 2016 included "guest blog posts from professionals" covering business topics, adding another layer to the corporate parody.
Coppy's fan art ascension image by Sowamemeski hit 24,000 notes in just two days, making it one of the most viral responses to a Tumblr April Fools' joke.
Frequently Asked Questions
References (8)
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- 4Coppy - Know Your Memeencyclopedia
- 5Office Assistantencyclopedia
- 6Coppy - Urban Dictionarydictionary
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