fourth-wall joke

English

Noun

fourth-wall joke (plural fourth-wall jokes)

1. Alternative form of fourth wall joke
   • 2005 September 27, Eric Winkler, quoting Mike Henry, “‘Untold’ heights: ‘Family Guy’ takes unrated movie straight to DVD”, in The Kansas City Star, 126th year, number 10, page E3:

     It was cool to be able to do kind of fourth-wall jokes, where we’re treating the characters as if maybe they’re not just characters.

   • 2014 June 13, Rene Rodriguez, “Funny thing, the sequel’s pretty good”, in Miami Herald, page 10G:

     One of the great things about 22 Jump Street, which does for sequels what the previous film did for big-screen TV adaptations, is that it incorporates all its fourth-wall jokes and references into an actual plot.

   • 2016, Jack Curtis Dubowsky, “Blazing Saddles: Music and Meaning in ‘The French Mistake’”, in Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness (K.J. Donnelly, editor, Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture, →ISSN), Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, part III (Queering of Genre), page 209:

     Brooks’ formula includes a tight script, likable characters, Borscht Belt humor, vaudevillian song and dance numbers, deliberately Brechtian fourth-wall jokes, intertextual references to other films and personalities, provocative innuendo, and colorful language, creating films that are outré yet have wide audience appeal.

   • 2017, T. H. Cooney, “Adolescent Humour”, in Beyond the Box: Tom’s Top Movie Peeves, Lulu.com, →ISBN:

     Guess I really like fourth-wall jokes.