Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down That Fourth Wall

This is where talking to the camera gets you. Everywhere.

Is it just me, or have characters on TV noticed that we're watching them (usually without pants on)? I'm talking about the fourth wall, and I'm talking about how the modern sitcom seems to have done away with it entirely.

Full disclosure: for the purposes of this post I will be using the TVTropes entry on Breaking the Fourth Wall for my definition of the device.


This post was brought about by a moment episode 14, season 3 of Modern Family, entitled "Me? Jealous?" One of the plots concerns Cam, Mitch and Lily moving in with Gloria, Jay and Manny. Cam and Gloria therefore tread heavily on one another's turf as the wife (obviously since Cam is the "gayer" gay one, he's like a woman, right? But that's for another post). Early on we establish their jealousies as Cam tells the camera "I didn't know [Lily's] hair was broken," when Gloria says she'll fix it. And Gloria tells us "I didn't know my house needed brightening up," when Cam brings home some flowers. It's all very normal Modern Family stuff. Characters talk to the camera all the time.

But then the show broke the fourth wall in a way that seemed wrong. Then I realized Modern Family has done this kind of thing before: Looking at the camera with a face that says "look at this motherfucker right here!" Jim and Pam from The Office do it to the point where they're my least favourite parts of a show I don't even really like. Let me show you the look via Eric Stonestreet (Cam) when Gloria says she'll take Lily to school (normally Cam's job).

"She's mothering my child! I'm the mother! That's what I was just complaining
about! Get it?"

It's not quite an aside like you'd see in Shakespeare, more like an unspoken aside. An "look aside" (let it be known that I coined that term as far as I know). Like a look between friends when someone near them is being a drunken idiot at a party. Immediately thereafter Cam says he'll use the extra time gained from not taking Lily to school to dust. Gloria gives us the same kind of look.

It's not simply that shows today seem to be breaking the fourth wall more often. That's a stylistic conceit and those come and go in terms of popularity and ubiquity. But the look asides and how they're being used. Would you be surprised if I told you I'd noticed it more in shows that don't have laugh tracks?

Now, I'm not going to do research to back this up because if I did, that would take a long time. But as far as my very scientific observations go, characters in laugh track-free shows tend to pull these look asides more than others. Also worth noting is that overall fourth wall breaking tends to be more common in our modern, laugh track-free sitcoms (The Office, Parks and Rec, Family Guy, South Park, Modern Family, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, American Dad, The Simpsons, Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle, The Larry Sanders Show, really, I could go on, especially if you keep letting me list cartoons as sitcoms). You could say "Well I Love Lucy did it when they wrote Lucille Ball's pregnancy into the show," and you'd be right. It's been going on since forever. But generally speaking, it doesn't happen with a huge amount of frequency in film and television. Which is why it's breaking a writer's rule. 

After all, the most successful (commercially, which is all that matters) sitcoms around are the ones with BOTH laugh tracks and look asides or at least some fourth wall breaking? Shows like How I Met Your Mother, which uses almost constant narration and self-reference as well as the occasional look aside and combines that with a laugh track to get consistent top-15 rankings in the weekly Neilson ratings. Don't forget the most wildly successful show in the last decade, Two and a Half Men, which took the real hard-partying womanizer mystique around Charlie Sheen and just changed his last name to Harper and called it a day. 

"This is the funniest thing I've ever seen. I should totally put this on
 tv." - nobody but Chuck Lorre

Could it be that despite years of our clamoring for the removal of the laugh track, TV still wants to make damned sure that we're laughing when we're supposed to? That when we complain-forced hip shows to leave out the laugh track, they simply said "those guys are idiots and we still need to tell them when to laugh. Let's just have characters looks at them like 'isn't this ridiculous?'" Could it be that giving us super-obvious cues to laugh still works better for most viewers than good writing? 

Could it be that we NEED this? 

Yes. Because we're idiots.