Nope, you’re thinking of [, which I’ve never seen (and never will). [url=“http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120777”]The Opposite of Sex](http://us.imdb.com/Title?0105063"The Opposite Sex and How to Live with Them"[/url) is actually a decent movie. It also has a “Friends” star in it (Lisa Kudrow), adding to the confusion.
Damn - if I would have previewed I would have seen my URL botch and seen that lolagranola was researching on IMDB at the same time I was. 
I thought of two more:
Doesn’t Yahoo Serious address the audience from time to time in Young Einstein?
And there’s that scene in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, where Austin worries about the details of travelling back in time. Basil says, “I suggest you don’t worry about it, Austin, and just have a good time.” Then he and Austin both look at the camera and Basil says, “And I suggest you don’t worry about it either.”
The Emperor’s New Groove goes so far as to have the title character stop the film, come on screen, and diagram some of the action.
The Skipper would often look right into the camera with an exasperated look, after hitting me on the head with his hat. Another friend of mine, Dobie Gillis, would sometimes talk directly to the audience.
Woody Allen did this several times in Annie Hall and a few of his other films. Probably the most memorable of these scenes is the famous Marshal McLuhan scene from Annie Hall.
Just to contribute a little to this thread, but the otherwise-forgettable sitcom I Married Dora ended the last episode of the (first and) last season by breaking the fourth wall and having the cast say “farewell” to the viewers.
Gotta go see The Emperor’s New Groove sometime…
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Groucho Marx yet. He does this in a number of his films, including “Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers” IIRC.
Clarissa Explains it All, the show where Melissa Joan Hart first got her start on Nickelodeon.
I don’t know if this counts, but MST3K.
The Sum of Us, with Russell Crowe, is one of the best examples of breaking the fourth wall. And High Fidelity uses it pretty well also, but in general, I’m kinda getting sick of seeing it.
James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” - George Lazenby (when a woman runs away from him just before the opening credits) says “This never happened to the other fellow” to the camera as a reference to Sean Connery’s James Bond’s luck with women.
Yeah, that’s the one. Sorry about that, and thanks for looking it up. (Trust me, it’s terrible, because the “fourth wall” idea is intrusive. “Why,” asked Leonard Maltin, “do these people think we care about them?”)
Thanks, porcupine and lolagranola.
I seem to remember in Airplane Robert Hayes turning to the camera and saying “What a pisser!” possibly after Julie Hagerty tells him she doesn’t love him.
This is also a common staple of animation (particularly shorts), the greatest example IMHO being Chuck Jones’s brilliant Duck Amuck
Saved by the Bell- Zack did that all the time.
The Adventures of Pete and Pete- Pete (older Pete) did it too, if I recall correctly.
Is there any sort of distinction between “breaking the fourth wall” and “narration?” I think breaking the fourth wall is a deliberate acknowledgement that what’s happening is a movie/play/TV show etc. Richard III’s soliloquies are a device that allows the audience to understand the character’s motivations. On the other hand, the Chorus in Henry V (and this perhaps is a function of Choruses in general, not unique to Shakespeare. I’m not as up on my theatre terms as I’d like) repeatedly state that they are in a play: “Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France? Or, may we cram within this wooden O the very casks that did afright the air at Agincourt?”
It can be difficult, even impossible, to say which is which in some of the cases mentioned. Fight Club, I think, counts in at least one instance, when they’re talking about “cigarette marks” in films and Brad Pit points to one just as it appears on the screen. High Fidelity, IMO, does not count, as its simply first person narration. Although John Cusack is adressing the camera, and therefore the audience, there is no explicit confession that what we are seeing is fictious.
(BTW: Blazing Saddles is actually the best example of this, when the climactic brawl literally breaks the fourth wall and spills into adjacent movie sets, the studio commisary, etc.)
Miller wrote:
I don’t know exactly what constitutes breaking the fourth wall'. The fourth wall’ is a wall that presumably exists in the room the characters are in, but which has effectively been removed so that the audience can see into the room. In normal drama, the characters don’t acknowledge that this wall is missing. But does any play with a soliloquy break the fourth wall? Any play with a narrator?
I myself prefer to reserve the term for those times when characters in a story exibit knowledge of being characters in a story.
I personally reserve the phrase for when the character directly addresses the audience, as opposed to simply speaking to himself (or thinking out loud). With this definition, soliloquies and simple narratives don’t count. But that could be just me.
The TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (later simply Dobie) used this a lot – The camera would cut away from the action to Dwayne Hickman as the titular Dobie, standing in “limbo” in front of a reproduction of Rodin’s atatue “The Thinker” (just to let you know that these were Dobie’s thoughts – a clever little device), where he would unashamedly talk directly out at the audience.
The original plays of A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt and ** Amadeus** by Peter Scaeffer featured the Point of View character (not the title character in either case, but The Common Man in the former and Antonio Salieri in the latter) constantly addressing the audience and commenting on the action. In both cases, the movie version, as rewritten by the original author, completely removed this feature, and the “fourth wall” remained intact. (Bolt simply removed it altogether, while Schaeffer turned it into Salieri addressing the priest in a sort of confession.)I think that the plays, with this broken fourth wall, were much more lively and interesting.
There are plenty of examples of this in movies, especially in the fifties and sixties. And it’s in a hell of a lot of cartoons.
The end of the Spice Girls movie (blame my daughter for my knowing this, not me) - they all talk to the theater audience (“You over there! No, you! I like your dress!”).