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 occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. 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. grc-gre, , "depth") is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay " Peri Bathous", to describe an ...

. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, 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 premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...

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

History

Old Comedy Old Comedy (''archaia'') 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 the ...

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

Aristophanes Aristophanes (; grc, Ἀριστοφάνης, ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion ( la, Cydathenaeum), was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his for ...

, 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. Self-referential humor was popularized by Douglas Hofstadter who 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.

Classification

Meta-jokes 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 in some way, int ...

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

Joke template

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

Self-referential jokes

Self-referential Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

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

Jokes about jokes ("meta-humor")

''Meta-humour'' is humour about humour. Here ''meta'' is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata (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 c ...

(a play within a play, as in ''Hamlet''), and metafiction.

Other examples

Alternate punchlines

Another kind of meta-humour makes fun of poor jokes by replacing a familiar punchline with a serious or nonsensical alternative. Such jokes expose the fundamental criterion for joke definition, "funniness", via its deletion. Comedians such as George Carlin and Mitch Hedberg used metahumour of this sort extensively in their routines.

Anti-humor

Anti-humor is a type of indirect and alternative comedy that involves the joke-teller delivering something that is intentionally not funny, or lacking in intrinsic meaning. The humor of such jokes is based on the surprise factor of absence of an expected joke or of a punch line in a narration that is set up as a joke.Warren A. Shibles
Humor Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Classification and Analysis
(Hardcover) 1998 It depends upon reference to the audience's expectations on what a joke is.

Breaking the fourth wall

Self-referential humor is at times combined with breaking the fourth wall to make explicit reference directly to the audience or to make self-reference to an element of the medium the characters should not be aware of.

Class-referential jokes

This form of meta-joke contains a familiar class of jokes as part of the joke.

''Bar'' jokes

Comedian jokes

The process of being a humorist is also the subject of meta-jokes; for example, on an episode of ''QI'', Jimmy Carr 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.

Limericks

A limerick (poetry), limerick referring to the anti-humor of limericks: W. S. Gilbert wrote one of the definitive "anti-limericks": Tom Stoppard's anti-limerick from ''Travesties'':

Metaparody

Metaparody is a form of humor or literary technique consisting "parodying the parody of the original", sometimes to the degree that the viewer is unclear as to which subtext is genuine and which subtext parodic.

RAS Syndrome

RAS syndrome refers to the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating one or more words. However, "RAS" stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome; therefore, the full phrase yields "Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome" and is self-referencing in a comical manner. It also reflects an excessive use of Three-letter acronym, TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

Examples

Hedberg

Stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg 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."

Rehnquist

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:

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.

References

{{Reflist Humour Self-reference Jokes