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Self-referential humor

Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression[1] that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential 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. 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 play within a play as in Hamlet) and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.

Alternative name(s)

Meta humor

History[edit]

Old Comedy of Classical Athens is held to be the first—in the extant sources—form of self-referential comedy. Aristophanes, 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.[2]


Douglas Hofstadter wrote several books on the subject of self-reference;[3][4] the term meta has come to be used, particularly in art, to refer to something that is self-referential.[5]

Breaking the fourth wall

Indirect self-reference

In-joke

Intertextuality

Irony

Dadaism

 – Productive prefix in English derived from Greek

Meta (prefix)

 – Type of self reference

Meta-reference

 – Process of repeating items in a self-similar way

Recursion

 – Sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself

Self-reference

 – Neologism for a type of cliché and phrasal template

Snowclone

 – Form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning

Surreal humour