?!
Well, looks like Telemark beat me to it by nearly a half hour. I swear I didn’t see that in preview…
I love a well-done break, and I’m particularly fond of the Groucho and Looney instances mentioned. If required to pick a favorite, I think it would be the one in A Tale of Two Kitties (Tweety’s first toon, in which–surprise!–cats try to catch and eat him):
As Catstello teeters precariously at the top of a ladder,
Babbit: “Give me the bird! Give me the bird!”
Catstello (to audience): “If the DA’s office would only let me, I’d give him the bird all right.”
One of my favorites is from Top Secret! I’m pretty sure I’ve seen similar bits in other movies: (from IMDb)
Nick Rivers: Listen to me Hillary. I’m not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Hillary Flammond: I know. It all sounds like some bad movie.
[Long pause. Both look at camera.]
I liked the little bits that were in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”. The first was when Jay and Bob were talking to Holden about the “Bluntman and Chronic” movie-in-the-movie*, and Holden says “A Jay and Silent Bob movie? Who’d pay to see that?” Then all three look into the camera.
After Jay and Bob make it to Hollywood, they come up on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (playing themselves) filming “Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season”, who are discussing how you should chose roles. Affleck says “First you’ve gotta do the safe picture. Then you do it for art. And then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him.” They then both look at the camera (although I always imagine they’re looking past the camera to Kevin Smith doing his director bit).
Then when Jay and Bob make it to the film set (“disguised” as Bluntman and Chronic), the enemy Cockknocker jumps through the wall, strikes a pose, and the film does a freeze frame with the caption (in a comic book font) “Look kids, it’s Mark Hamill! (applause)”. Geek that I am, I did
And one that wasn’t in the movie itself (I can’t remember whether it was one of the blooper bits in the credits or a DVD extra). Randall says to Dante “If you were funnier, ABC never would have canceled us”; referring to the short-lived (hell, mayfly-lived) “Clerks” animated series. It wasn’t to the camera, but since they’re pretty much acknowleging they are characters in a movie, I think it falls under 4th wall breaking.
*If you haven’t seen the movie, Holden is a comic book writer who created the superheroes Bluntman and Chronic based on Jay and Bob. The book gets optioned as a film, and J&B decide to go to Hollywood and stop it when they see internet fanboys bashing the characters.
While maybe not a movie Donkey Kong Country frequently acknowledges that they’re video game characters. It was pretty original at the time too, for that format.
D’oh, my post got eaten. I was saying that I liked that about Jay and Silent Bob. It wasn’t a great movie, but once it turned into a Kevin Smith-style Looney Tune in the last section, it was rather fun.
There are numerous instances in Laurel & Hardy movies where Oliver Hardy breaks the fourth wall,not with sound, but with a look, to great comedic effect.
I just remembered another one, “The Real Inspector Hound” by Tom Stoppard.
When I saw it, the set was a typical English drawing room, but angled a little bit to the right, and at stage right were some theater seats facing back toward the main set. It opens with two theater critics in those seats who have come to review a new play. The play-within-a-play starts; it’s a murder mystery. During the intermission, a phone rings onstage and one of the critics goes to answer it. The play resumes while he’s still onstage and he is treated as just another character. So the fourth wall is broken (and only in the opposite direction from normal) and a fifth wall is maintained between the characters, critics and the audience.
There was a real clever one during Deep Space Homer. During the Corvair’s re-entry, the whole family watches on TV and Lisa is worried. Grampa says, “Of course he’ll make it! It’s TV.”
Another great one is In Marge We Trust. After examining the Mr. Sparkle box, Bart says to Homer, “Hey, if they got a picture of you, that means they can see you. They must be watching us right now!” Marge says, “Oh don’t be ridiculous! No one is watching us right now!” and then they all look around nervously.
Another favorite is right before a commercial break in And Maggie Makes Three when Marge states, “I’m just going to sit here and think about products I might like to purchase. Ooh, I don’t have that…”
George Burns may have done the ultimate fourth wall gag.
Fred Clark (who played Harry Morton) was leaving the show (going to do Broadway, I think). In a scene where Harry was to walk through a door and get hit over the head with a flower vase, Burns stopped the action, explained that Clark was leaving the show, and introduced Larry Keating as his replacement. Both Clark and Keating acknowledged the applause, then Clark left the stage, and Burns had Keating walk through the door and get hit with the vase.
Actually the Hays Office, referencing the MPPDA (as it was known then) and its head Will Hays, which dictated what you could and couldn’t do in a film (this was back when they had a “Code” and before the ratings system).
A middle school favorite, Saved by the Bell. Zack would ocationaly address the audience to explain things, or more often, gloat about his success with women, or the how he got away with something.
If we’re doing TV shows, then the best example is the Charlie’s Angles spoof She Spies (syndicated). They use a hundred variations on the theme, from labeling the villains Bad Guy and Really Bad Guy, to telling viewers to go to shespies.com to buy the tools they use to break into anywhere anytime, to stopping the action and looking into the camera to deliver the exposition to explain what the plot is all about this week. It’s a wonderful spoof and at least ten times better than the first Charlie’s Angels movie was.
