Comics device--it's not breaking the fourth wall exactly . . . does it happen in other media

There have been a number of gags on David Letterman centering around visible boom mics and falling sandbags/spotlights.

The “Kentucky Fried Theater” crew did this a lot, too. In Top Secret nick reads a letter left at his table and you hear an echoing voice-over. Then the camera pulls back to reveal the guy reading the letter into a megaphone.

The center dude’s codpiece violates my eyes.

It isn’t really violating the fourth wall so much as calling explicit attention to it, but the Narrator of Henry V essentially apologises to the audience for the play being a bunch of actors in a rubbish re-enactment of momentous historical events, and craves the audience’s imaginative indulgence in pretending it’s all real: which is, of course, the implicit contract entered into by an audience anyway, so basically Shakespeare is lampshading the fact that this is all make-believe. Of course, the Narrator of the play isn’t the most reliable of sources…

Here’s a case of a regular book character briefly acknowledging his existence within the confines of a book’s pages, in a way very similar to the OP’s example. I’ll quote myself from this thread about authors referencing themselves as authors:


The wonderfully whimsical and sometimes absurdist mystery author Edmund Crispin, who wrote mysteries featuring the eccentric Oxford professor Gervase Fen, goes a step further and often breaks the fourth wall, implying that Fen actually knows he’s in a novel.

One of my favorite passages occurs in The Moving Toyshop, when Fen and a poet comrade have been knocked out and captured by a person or persons unknown. As Cadogan (the poet) groggily recovers from unconsciousness, he hears Fen talking to keep himself occupied:

Later, while Fen and Cadogan are running around during a chase scene, Cadogan asks which direction they should head in. Fen suggests going “…Left … After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.”

(Gollancz was Crispin’s left-leaning publishing house.)


The other characters never seem to acknowledge Fen’s unusual comments, and probably just brush them off as his usual whimsical nonsense.