Self-referential humor
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Self-referential humor relies on a subject making light of itself in some manner. For example, a comedy play that featured the story of a group of fictional thespians attempting to put on a comedy play (as is the premise of Noises Off) would be fertile ground for self-referential humor. Because it can be subtle, it is often used instead of more obvious humor in places that aspire to be taken seriously.
Self-referential humor is sometimes combined with breaking the fourth wall to explicitly make the reference directly to the audience, or make self-reference to an element of the medium that the characters shouldn't be aware of.
[edit] Examples
- The Simpsons frequently employs self-referential humor. Among many other examples, in "Bart's Girlfriend", while pondering why a girl doesn't like him, Bart Simpson wonders, "is it my hair? My overbite? The fact that I've worn the same clothes day in, day out for the last four years?" All of these are sometimes-critised design elements of most Simpsons characters. In "Bart Gets Famous", Bart becomes famous for saying a catchphrase on television, which made many joking references to The Simpsons own success with catchphrases.
- In the drama, Degrassi: The Next Generation, an episode has Emma Nelson say the line "Westdrive is so issue of the week". Degrassi itself can be considered an 'issue of the week' show and it is also a reference to Westdrive, a real street in Toronto much like De Grassi Street.
[edit] Examples of self-referential humor in software
Software is sometimes named with a humorous self-referencing, i.e. recursive acronym.
- The first, and most popular, case is the name of the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) project.
- WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator;
- LAME, for LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder; and
- PHP, for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
- An extreme example is The Hurd, where "HURD" refers to HIRD of Unix Replacing Daemons, with "HIRD" in turn referring to HURD of Interface-Representing Depth, essentially creating a mutually recursive acronym.
