“Verbatim: What Is A Photocopier?”

“Truth is stranger than fiction” is something unimaginative people say. Seriously, if you can’t conjure up ideas or incidents far more bizarre than ever day life, then yours is either a sadly limited fantasy or a ridiculously exciting reality. But there are times when these true moments resonate as odd or weird. Whether it’s that whole Lincoln/JFK stuff or any sort of whacko urban legend that’s revealed as actually happening, there are tons of moments in history where the whole thing feels scripted. Lazily scripted at that, with some way too on-the-nose stuff happening far too often recently. In a year of apocalyptic plagues and civil unrest, the world was also treated to—amongst other things—murder hornets, vampire fish, and that weird green ooze coming out of a sinkhole in Toronto. As an existence, it feels like reality has jumped the shark.

But occasionally, this janky waking world of ours leads to a confluence of just the right personalities to produce an exceptional event. A moment in time where it would be mildly amusing if you knew it was the product of a paid writer or some tortured fantasist, but because it is captured in the wild it reads as a skip in the vinyl record of reality. Such is the circumstance captured in this 2014 short film from New York Times (or an “Op-Doc” as they call it, but…I’m not going to call it that). Directed by Brett Weiner, the less than seven minute short uses the transcript of a 2010 deposition that gets exceedingly farcical with each new line. Verbatim: What Is A Photocopier? finds a lawyer (John Ennis) growing increasingly irate with a person (Mike McCafferty) who demands an exact and exhaustive definition of what is a photocopier before he can answer any questions pertaining to it. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.