Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is

self-referential Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields. In natural language, natural or formal languages, ...

in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the

humor Humour ( Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids i ...

in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, ''meta'' is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

(data about data),

metatheatrics A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes ...

(a play within a play as in ''

Hamlet ''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play (the ...

'') and

metafiction Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story ...

. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of

bathos Bathos ( ;''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed. "bathos, ''n.'' Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1885. , "depth") is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay " Peri Bathous", to describe an amusingly ...

. In general, self-referential humor often uses

hypocrisy Hypocrisy is the practice of feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. The word "hypocrisy" entered the English language ''c.'' 1200 with the meaning "the sin of pretending to virtue or goodness". Today, "hypocrisy" ofte ...

oxymoron An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that Juxtaposition, juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction (disambiguation), self-contradiction. As a rhetorical de ...

, or

paradox A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictor ...

to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.

History

Old Comedy Old Comedy is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians.Mastromarco (1994) p.12 The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with their daring pol ...

of Classical Athens is held to be the first—in the extant sources—form of self-referential comedy.

Aristophanes Aristophanes (; ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Ancient Greek comedy, comic playwright from Classical Athens, Athens. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. The majority of his surviving play ...

, whose plays form the only remaining fragments of Old Comedy, used fantastical plots, grotesque and inhuman masks and status reversals of characters to slander prominent politicians and court his audience's approval.

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, Strange loop, strange ...

wrote several books on the subject of self-reference; the term '' meta'' has come to be used, particularly in art, to refer to something that is self-referential.

Meta-jokes

Meta-jokes are a popular form of humor. They contain several somewhat different, but related categories: ''joke templates'', ''class-referential jokes'', ''self-referential jokes'' and ''jokes about jokes''.

Joke template

This form of meta-joke is a

sarcastic Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although it is not necessarily ironic. Most noticeable in spoken word, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflectio ...

jab at the endless refitting of joke forms (often by professional comedians) to different circumstances or characters without a significant innovation in the humor.

Class-referential jokes

This form of meta-joke contains a familiar class of

joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, ...

s as part of the joke. For example, here are a few subversions of the standard

bar joke A bar joke is a type of joke cycle. The basic syntax is as follows: "A walks into a bar and ". First recorded example The earliest known example of a bar joke is Sumerian, appearing in the form of two slightly different versions of a proverb ...

format:

Self-referential jokes

Self-referential Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields. In natural language, natural or formal languages, ...

jokes refer to themselves rather than to larger classes of previous jokes.

Jokes about jokes

Marc Galanter, in the introduction to his book ''Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture'', cites a meta-joke in a speech of Chief Justice

William Rehnquist William Hubbs Rehnquist (October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American attorney who served as the 16th chief justice of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2005, having previously been an associate justice from 1972 to 1986. ...

I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes.

Stand-up comedian

Mitch Hedberg Mitchell Lee Hedberg (February 24, 1968 – March 23, 2005) was an American stand-up comedian known for his surreal humor and deadpan delivery. His comedy typically featured short, sometimes one-line jokes mixed with absurd elements and non s ...

would often follow up a joke with an admission that it was poorly told, or insist to the audience that "that joke was funnier than you acted." The process of being a humorist is also the subject of meta-jokes; for example, on an episode of '' QI'',

Jimmy Carr James Anthony Patrick Carr (born 15 September 1972) is an Irish-British comedian, presenter, writer and actor. He is known for his rapid-fire deadpan delivery of One-line joke, one-liners. He began his comedy career in 1997, and he has regula ...

made the comment, "When I told them I wanted to be a comedian, they laughed. Well, they're not laughing now!"— a joke previously associated with Bob Monkhouse.

Other examples

Fumblerules

Fumblerules are stylistic guidelines, presented such that the phrasing of the rule itself constitutes an infraction. For example, "Don't use no

double negatives A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You ...

Limericks

limerick Limerick ( ; ) is a city in western Ireland, in County Limerick. It is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Munster and is in the Mid-West Region, Ireland, Mid-West which comprises part of the Southern Region, Ireland, Southern Region. W ...

referring to the anti-humor of limericks: W. S. Gilbert wrote one of the definitive "anti-limericks":

Tom Stoppard Sir Tom Stoppard (; born , 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and politi ...

's anti-limerick from ''

Travesties ''Travesties'' is a 1974 play by Tom Stoppard. It centres on the figure of Henry Wilfred Carr, Henry Carr, an old man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during World War I, the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he w ...

'': A limerick about limericks:

Metaparody

Metaparody is a form of humor or

literary technique A narrative technique (also, in fiction, a fictional device) is any of several storytelling methods the creator of a narrative, story uses, thus effectively relaying information to the audience or making the story more complete, complex, or engag ...

consisting "parodying the

parody A parody is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satire, satirical or irony, ironic imitation. Often its subject is an Originality, original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, e ...

of the original", sometimes to the degree that the viewer is unclear as to which

subtext In any communication, in any medium or format, "subtext" is the underlying or implicit meaning that, while not explicitly stated, is understood by an audience. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "an underlying and often distinct theme ...

is genuine and which subtext parodic. An example of a Metaparody would be the film "Scary Movie" which parodies the film "Scream" which is itself a parody.

RAS Syndrome

RAS syndrome RAS syndrome, where ''RAS'' stands for redundant acronym syndrome (making the phrase "RAS syndrome" autological), is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in ...

is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an

acronym An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...

or initialism with the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating one or more words. "RAS" stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome and so ''RAS syndrome'' is self-referencing.

References

{{Comedy footer Humour Jokes Metafictional techniques Self-reference