The pottery-girl singers in Disney’s animated Hercules.
The OP mentioned Do The Right Thing. When you think about it, there was another narrator – Samuel l. Jackson’s Daddy Love (Bed-Stuy’s radio DJ) commented on the film’s ongoing actions and aftermath and was only peripherally involved in what was going on.
The body snatchin’ serial killer Reese narrates his own near-death in Denzel Washington’s body in Fallen. This may not fit the OP’s definition but it was a neat twist to the narrator cliche.
Oh, and Danny DeVito’s character in L.A. Confidential.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but what about Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel in LotR?
Probably no one here is old enough to remember this TV show, but someone may have caught it on reruns:
The Burns and Allen Show with the comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen.
Periodically the show would cut to George watching the show on television so he would be up on what was going on and he would make comments about it to the audience. To me it was the height of surealism, yet it made so much sense. I mean, everybody else in the country knew that Gracie was hatching a plot to get a new car by selling the old one because they were watching the show, why shouldn’t George?
Burns used it again in his next television venture - I can’t remember the name - the one with Julie Newmar (I think). It lasted less then one season, if I remember correctly.
I always wondered why it was never used by anyone else. It always seemed such a wonderful tool for comedy. Granted it had to be someone like Burns’ character who was of yet apart of the action, but I always thought it could work again.
TV
I remember, years ago, Letterman did a bit on his show where they cut to a camera in his home where he was watching the pre-recorded show in real time because by the time it was on air he was home for the night.
The DJ from The Warriors
How about the current movie Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events? Lemony Snicket, the narrator, is a character in the movie, though he doesn’t interact with the main plot at any point.
Once, as himself (probably as a result of one of Boss Hogg’s speed traps), according to TV Tome. The IMDb, which I checked prior to posting earlier, made no mention of any guest spots.
Good one!
How about It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? Would the cops be considered narrators?
I was going to mention that! Played (voiced) by the late, great Lynne Thigpen although you only see her mouth.
Gary Shandling did the same thing (or something very similar) in this first sitcom: It’s Gary Shandling’s Show.
While we’re on the subject of narrating DJs, what the one played by Cleavon Little (who apparently works a 24 hour shift for a radio station that’s so powerful it can heard all over the Western U.S. even during daylight) in Vanishing Point?
How 'bout Roger Miller’s rooster Alan-a-dale in Disney’s Robin Hood?
Ewan McGregor narrates the flashbacks in which he appears in Big Fish.
Sure, those flashbacks are told as stories, but one would expect the character’s older self, played by Albert Finney, to tell them. The fact that the somewhat (often more-than-somewhat) fictional younger version always comes in as the storyteller adds to the surrealism.
There’s the blind push car operator in O Brother Where Art Thou, who prophesies for the three escapees. That was pretty surreal.
Two pages in, and no one mentions Joe Gillis from “Sunset Blvd”?? Okay, granted he interacts with everyone else in the movie in a big way (being the principal character, course), but considering that at the start of the movie he’s dead and floating face-down in Norma’s pool, and narrates the events of the film from the great beyond, well that’s pretty surreal!
A 1980s film whose title I cannot recall just now, but starring Jeremy Irons & Glenn Close and about a “ficitionalized” recount of Claus Von Bulow’s murder trial, kind of borrowed the idea. Again, at start of the movie, Glenn Close’s character is in a permanent vegetative coma and narrates the movie in voiceover. (Ironically, Close then went on to do the stage version of “Sunset Blvd.” How’s that for small world mechanics?)
Anyway, IIRC, the stage musical “Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” has a narrator hanging out on stage and making singing comments to the audience, but seemingly invisible to the other characters onstage.
Gary Shandling had an awesome episode using the real life/tv show duality. His nephew takes a trip to Hollywood leaving Gary to watch his goldfish. The fish dies and Gary replaces it but his nephew, while in Hollywood, watches a taping of the Gary Shandling show and sees Gary replacing his goldfish and yells out from the audience…
I want to watch that one episode again, just for the surealism.