As I am watching Family Guy break the fourth wall (for those who don’t know it’s when a character makes a self reference or talks to the audience) I was wondering what TV show did it first. Granted I am young, but the only one that I can think of is actually The Simpsons. They would, especially in their early years, talk about things like wearing the same clothes, the story ending, copying other forms of media, and other things.
Anyone know what TV show did it first? And for that matter movie, book, comic (Deadpool) etc?
Before my time, but didn’t Dobie Gillis (1959) do this? I may be misremembering, as I only saw the show a couple of times in reruns, but I think Dobie would sometimes break from the scene to talk to the camera.
On preview, looks like Burns and Allen beat him to it.
I’d say this was pretty common – but less thought of as something subversive – in the early days of TV. The Jack Benny program, for instance, had Jack and his gang playing fictionalized versions of themselves (for instance, Dennis, the neighbor, just happened to have a lovely singing voice and there was an excuse to show it off every week). And there would be occasional gags where Benny would peek through the fourth wall, because everybody knew these weren’t his real neighbors and friends, but his troupe. To be fair, I’ve only seen a couple episodes of the Benny show and this particular type of gag was absent, but I’ve certainly heard it on his radio show, and I can’t imagine it didn’t show up when he moved to the idiot box.
One of the shows was a farce where they go into town and all the lead actors make cameos as “themselves”.
At one point Ralph and Ed start arguing about whether Jackie Gleason or Art Carney is funnier. Finally they ask a passerby for his opinion, and the guy says “I wouldn’t know, I watch Perry Como.” - that kills the argument! Hilarious stuff!
According to Wiki, and also according to my own memories from watching it at the time, the Jack Benny Program, also starting in 1950, didn’t have a fourth wall as such. It was kind of free flowing where the main characters went from bantering among themselves on stage, to playing fictionalized versions of themselves in situation comedy type segments. It was in fact a bit surreal.
Topper (based on the 1937 movie) was a sitcom that ran from 1953-1955. I used to watch it in reruns; they broke the fourth wall several times. The title character, Cosmo Topper, was an elderly conservative banker played by Leo G. Carroll with a very dry sense of humor who would make asides to the audience and get (canned) laughter, and once the character of Mrs. Topper even referred to the laugh track; she made an unfunny pun and when there was no laugh track said “It’s odd, when Cosmo makes jokes like that the laughs just come from everywhere.” (Canned laughter followed.)
Topper was haunted by two ghosts only he could see (Robert Sterling and Ann Jeffries) and she particularly would mug at the camera and occasionally address the audience.
Yeah, The Jack Benny Show was about a guy named Jack Benny who had a radio/tv show that he was always getting ready, and the problems that came up with putting together that week’s show. Sometimes the show featured part of the show that fictional Jack had been preparing. Sometimes the actors ad-libbed lines into the fictional show, breaking up other actors, making the real show about how the fictional show had affected the real show.
It got kind of “meta”.
Of course, George Burns made no pretense at all, and introduced the tv episodes looking right at the camera, and then walked around a wall and entered the sitcom. He also did little narrations during the half-hour. He played George Burns who was an a famous vaudevillian and radio writer/actor who now had a sitcom, which is a lot like Benny, except that George wasn’t even winking about the whole thing; he was putting up posters about it. Then you get the problem of shoe-horning the Carnation Evaporated Milk ad into the plot. This became so problematic and obvious that the actors sometimes made little quips about the problem itself: “Oh, is that how you’re running it this week?” with a wink.
I’m sure it is by no means the first example in film but Groucho directly addresses the audience in the Marx Brothers films - my favourite is from “Horse Feathers”. When faced with what he regards as a tedious musical number, he turns to the camera and says “I’ve got to stay here, but that’s no reason why you folks can’t go into the lobby until this thing blows over.”
Possibly Edwin S Porter’s 1903 film “The Great Train Robbery” and its final frame of a gunshot into the face of the audience might count too. Apparently it quite freaked people out, back in the day.
There are instances in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road to” pictures where they break the wall (e.g. Hope turning to the camera and saying “You can go get popcorn now, Bing is going to sing”).
Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude was an experimental play in which characters broke away from the other actors and addressed soliloquies directly to the audience.* It was produced on Broadway in 1928 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
So when Kaufman and Ryskind wrote *Animal Crackers *for the Marx Brothers in late 1928 - reprised on film in 1930 - they included scenes in which Groucho steps out of the scene, announces he is having a strange interlude and speaks philosophical nonsense directly to the audience/camera.
This may have left them in the aisles in New York, but slight problem elsewhere. Strange Interlude wasn’t made into a movie until 1932. Most audiences would have no idea what Groucho was parodying.
We don’t today either, to be sure, and we still find it funny, but we miss most of the point.
*Soliloquies directly to the audience is redundant, I know. Breaking the fourth wall is an ancient technique.
Well, technically, don’t Shakespeare plays often start and end with someone talking directly to the audience, basically to bring them up to speed, in the 16th-century equivalent of the opening text crawl in Star Wars?
