The Young Ones made extensive use of it especially with music acts. Pointing to the camera and saying, “Music!” during the University Challenge episode, for example.
Two other favorites of mine are the Blackadder The Third episode where he complains about being robbed by a transvestite highwayman and left to die on an unrealistic set.
and
Blackadder: I want to be remembered when I’m dead. I want books written about me. I want songs sung about me. And then hundreds of years from now I want episodes of my life to be played out weekly at half past nine by some great heroic actor of the age.
Baldrick: Yeah, and I could be played by some tiny tit in a beard.
Blackadder: Quite.
In the Red Dwarf episode “Backwards” if you record the barkeeps short speech and play it backwards it is a message to the viewers to stop wasting your time decoding the backwards messages. They make you work at it, but it eventually breaks the wall.
I thought it was very unfunny in Austin Power: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Maybe because if they did it in the first movie, it was a little to sublte for me to notice. But they were very blatant in the second movie. It didn’t click. Most of the time, breaking the fourth wall works for me.
And in “Cash”, when they’re dead broke and Vyvyan claims to be pregnant, Rik goes on an anti-goverment rant, finishing up by pointing at the camera and shouting, “I hope you’re satisfied, Thatcher!” Oh, and in the same ep, he says, “I’m so hungry I could eat my own earwax! And we all know how horrid that tastes [to camera]…right, kids?”
Then there was “Summer Holiday”, in which Vyv announces heartily, “Look! Here comes the postman!”
Mike: Vyv, why do you keep telling us what’s just about to happen?
Vyv: Because it’s a studio set, Mike, and they can’t afford any long shots.
And in “Sick”, Neil’s mum wrecks the breakaway chair ahead of time, with the result that Rik later gets hit with a real chair…but I could go on all night.
Two Woody Woodpecker instances:
Woody failed to stock up for the winter the way all the other animals did. Cupboard, fridge, pantry: all empty. He faces the “camera” (if you call it that in animation), and says, “Would one of you care to step into the lobby and get me a candy bar?”
In a later incarnation, Woody and his niece Knothead and nephew Splinter have spent the whole cartoon trying to thwart some other animal. This involves a great many firecrackers. Just after the resolution, the screen goes MST3K, with shadows along the lower edge, and one shadow stands up to ask, “Hey—whatever happened to that last firecracker?”
Oh, wait, I remembered a third! A one-off character gives a check for a billion dollars to one of Woody’s antagonists, under the condition that he never do anything to hurt a bird. At the end, it turns out that the check was no good, and the so-called philanthropist is taken away in handcuffs, but stops to ask, “Is there a Mrs. Oleander Twinklebop in the audience? I have a billion-dollar check for her!”
To expand a bit – the reason characters/performers in the earlier theater frequently address the audience has a lot to do with lighting! In, for instance, Shakespeare’s day, plays were performed outside, in broad daylight, and it’s much easier to talk to an audience you can see.
As someone else noted, pre-modern drama was full of acknowledgements of its own theatricality – metatheater, if you want to get all scholarly and stuff. It gets quite complicated, sometimes – the medieval English cycle plays are a good example, albeit one that’d probably drag this thread offtopic. (Though I can explain further if anyone’s that interested!)
Animal House, when John Belushi is on the ladder about to get a view of the cheerleader undressing. He turns to the audience and does his trademark grin with the raised eyebrow. Floored me.
Airplane, when Ted’s girlfriend blows him off and runs to her flight. Robert Hays turns to the audience and says “What a pisser!” Just about the funniest thing in a very funny movie.
Interesting how every single example given so far has been a COMEDY, or at least a comedic moment in an otherwise serious film. (Except for Shakespeare, who used the “aside” in every one of his plays, to great effect.) Can anyone think of a strictly DRAMA film where “Breaking the 4th wall” was used? Hold that thought, I’ve got one:
Funny Games – a dark disturbing Austrian indie film (which some may consider a black comedy, if you’re truly the twisted type) which was discussed in this thread about a month ago. Every so often, one of the psychopathic home invasion guys would turn to the camera and say, “You agree with me, right?” as if to acknowledge that the audience was complicit in his evil deeds. Added a surreal (and slightly uncomfortable) touch to one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen.
Also…to expand on people’s answers to the guy who asked what “Breaking the Fourth Wall” means…in motion pictures, the “fourth wall” is the screen.
Surprisingly, there was also a good reference to the fourth wall in the movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. There’s a scene where a girl asks for his phone number, and he rattles off 555+four other digits.
Girl: Wait a minute! 555’s not a real number. They only use that in the movies.
“Dice”: No shit, honey. What do you think this is, real life?
Fight Club breaks the fourth wall quite a lot, but most explicitly in the scene where they’re doing various things to the food in the restaurant. The narrator breaks off in the middle of describing one particularly disgusting thing, and Tyler Durden looks up and says: “You can tell them”.
There’s also a scene where the ‘cigarette burn’; a mark that appears briefly in the corner of the screen when it’s time to change reels, is explained and it appears on the screen itself (I think one of the characters points to it). Also, a couple of pornographic images are spliced into the film, like Tyler did to the films he projected.
A Shot in the Dark, the second of the Pink Panther films, has Peter Sellers break the fourth wall at the end. Clouseau has gathered no clues; he has found no evidence; he has no idea who the criminal is. He only intends to gather them in one room, pretend to know the name of the criminal, and as he is about to reveal it, his assistant Hercule will turn off the lights. Whoever leaves the room is the murderer. Unfortunately, it looks as if everybody in the room is a murderer and Clouseau can’t get a word in edgewise. He’s pushed off to the side while the other characters catfight. Sellers gives a brilliant look of exasperation right to the camera, and it makes me laugh every time.
Animal Crackers. Groucho Marx. “Wait, I’m Cha–no, you’re Spau–could I look at a program a minute?”
Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frog.” "I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the station. “It’s a fair cop.” “And don’t talk to the audience.”
And one really terrible one. Ugh. Actually, a number of terrible ones. Maybe I just didn’t get this movie, but Orlando with Tilda Swinton had about a dozen direct glances at the camera. Instead of ending a scene with something of importance, she simply looked at the camera. I can’t stand it.
And as a third category, I’ll say I really am really terribly amazingly glad that The Princess Bride didn’t do this. It would have ruined its sweetness and its sense of fun.
Another one from Airplane!, when there is a really sappy moment between Ted and Elaine, and everyone on the plane and on the ground smiles and mugs for the camera.
In Airplane 2, Ted is going to blow the computer, and he’s walking into the computer room with a gas mask on. The sound effect is a person breathing through the gas mask. Ted stops, turns around and looks to see where the sound is coming from, then starts walking again.
