I was just watching Episode 2 of the second series of The Lazarus Project and this excellent exchange took place:
Samson - It’s an old military compound. Miles of tunnels underground they retrofitted into a velocity chamber.
Shiv - Like the Hadron Collider?
Samson - Exactly. Tunnels form a high-velocity track so the subject can reach the right speed for time travel.
Greta - Like 88 miles an hour in a DeLorean?
[chuckles]
Samson - Sorry?
Greta - 88 miles an hour in a DeLorean. It’s, uh, like Back to the Future.
Samson - Ah. Uh, I haven’t seen it.
The Dane- Really? Never?
Samson - I’m not really a movie guy.
Sarah - Right, but, like, I mean, it’s fucking Back to the Future.
Samson = Okay.
Sarah - [Sarah] Everyone’s seen it. My mum ’s seen it, and she hasn’t seen anything.
Samson - I’ve just been really busy with science and stuff.
George - But to be fair, you literally made a time machine. That’s like an archeologist not watching Jurassic Park.
Sarah - Palaeontologist.
George - What?
Sarah - It’s like a palaeontologist not watching Jurassic Park. An archeologist would watch Indiana Jones. They’re different jobs.
Wes - Shall we get back to it?
Samson - Yes, well…
Basically the whole series is about a Queen telling one of her servant girls her life story.
As the scenes of her story are being played out, the protagonist (the queen), will stop what she’s doing and talk directly to the camera.
Only except she’s not really talking to the audience. She’s taking a parenthetical pause to provide the servant girl with more context of the story she’s telling.
One of my favorite examples of this is in Archer where Cheryl keeps hearing the background music and finally puts her hands over her ears and shouts “It’s not diegetic!”.
Also, from Kingsman: The Secret Service: “This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv.”
In an end-of-season episode of the Viking comedy Norsemen, a plot development that may have been expected to happen did not, and one of the characters said “maybe it’ll happen next season”, seemingly breaking the 4th wall. Another character says “next season? What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s Summer now, maybe it’ll happen in the Fall”.
In Rick and Morty Rick casually mentions things happening in previous seasons several times and nobody even reacts. I like the episode where they encounter “Season Two Jerry” and everybody knows exactly who they’re talking about when they mention him.
In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody a record company exec doesn’t like the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” because it’s not the type of song that teenagers would bang their heads to in a car.
The exec is played by Mike Myers, who of course is well known for banging his head to BR in a car with Dana Carvey in Wayne’s World.
In one of Tom Clancy’s novels, John Clark and Domingo Chavez are in an old car, surveilling some bad guys. One of them mentions how real espionage is not like the movies. The other one says “Yeah, if this were a movie, this car would be a sports car, and you would be a beautiful blonde.”
I vaguely remember an 80s sitcom (I’m thinking it was Too Close For Comfort) where the family had a problem to solve and Ted Knight (or whoever it was) just sort of nonchalantly says something like, “Well, however we solve the problem, we only have 12 minutes to do it.” I don’t remember it being a time-based problem, it was just a joke that the show was going to be over in 12 minutes.
And once on Growing Pains, Dr. Seaver was angry with Mike for something, and he said, “We’re gonna talk about this later. During Moonlighting [the program that followed GP in the evening lineup].”
But Here’s my favorite yes it does/no it doesn’t fourth wall breaking scene (from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend).
In the forgettable sitcom Yes, Dear at the end of one episode they discuss why the furniture in the room is the way it is. One character tries to move the couch to the 4th wall (back to the viewers) and they all discuss how it feels wrong and they can’t really put anything against that wall.
What I’d like to see some time would be a character breaking the wrong fourth wall. Like, a character who knows that he’s in a comic book, and behaves accordingly, but it’s actually a movie.
A fourth wall break occurs when a performer acknowledges the presence of the audience, the camera, or any other observer. This is usually done by looking directly into the camera and/or addressing the audience directly.
In modern parlance, it’s anything that acknowledges the medium. This can be by speaking directly to the audience, but there’s lots of other ways it can happen. For instance, a comic character referencing the panel boundaries, or a movie character referring to the camera man, or anyone commenting on non-digetic music.
