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"If I live to be 100, I will never understand why they keep so many damn weapons under the ring. It's like they want the wrestlers to use them on each other..."
Lampshade Hanging: pointing out the use of a trope.
Often used when a writer tries to excuse or explain a plot element that's unlikely or overused by drawing attention to it. Also known as "hanging a clock on it", "hanging a lantern on it", or "spotlighting it". The version used in the Mutant Enemy bullpen was the 'lampshade' version, so it grabs the title.
E.g., having a character say "This idea is so crazy, it just might work!" or "I feel like I'm in a badly written TV show."
This can be a "Message from Fred," i.e., a message from the writer's subconscious that this plot element is, frankly, stupid. On the other hand, done well, it can be an entertaining piece of Fourth Wall breakage or momentary lack of Genre Blindness. It can also be used to take care of Fridge Logic, without having to actually do anything. Meta Trope Intro compares it with many other ways that a trope can be used.
Why the widespread practice is in place is a mystery in itself. One common theory is that writers for some reason find it humorous, clever, and original to point out how unclever and trite they're being. Another is that the creators are utilizing the tactic that by self-deprecatingly pointing out their own flaws themselves, they rob critics and opponents of their work of ammo.
Commonly seen in the self-aware shows that make up the Deconstructor Fleet.
See also Meta Guy. Compare Post Modernism.
Can also be combined with a Hand Wave, sometimes invoking an unreveal, to make explaining a plot inconsistency unnecessary.
Can also be combined with an active attempt to avoid the trope, in which case the Lampshade Hanging turns into a Defied Trope.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- The line "Dawn's in trouble. It must be Tuesday," from the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Once More with Feeling." (At the time, Buffy was broadcast on Tuesday nights.)
- In the Malcolm In The Middle episode "Malcolm Dates a Family," Malcolm engages in a bit of Lamp Shade Hanging when he realizes he's scheduled simultaneous dates: "This is like that episode of... well, everything."
- He even considered how Urkle handled the problem.
- In an episode from one of Mork And Mindy's later seasons, an exasperated Mindy exclaimed, "Oh, Mork, what Earth concept have you misunderstood this week?"
- Boy Meets World also engaged in quite a bit of this, particular with respect to the character played by William Daniels. Mr. Feeney served as the teacher of almost every class the protagonists took, from elementary school through college, being somehow qualified to teach elementary school, English, history, literature, writing, psychology, mathematics and quantum mechanics. Several times over the series, the Matthews brothers commented that Mr. Feeney had been their teacher an inordinate number of times. Mr. Feeney himself wryly comments that, in addition to being the principal and teaching five different subjects, he is also in charge of the Lost and Found, and other characters comment that Corey somehow brought his own professor with him to college. In the final episode of the fifth season (the last episode before college), a character from the first couple of series was briefly reintroduced. Corey asked him why they hadn't seen him for so long if they were in the same school, and the kid explained he'd been "in that half of the building" for the past couple of years - pointing to the studio audience. Corey grimaced and said, "oh no, we never go over there..."
- Said character also makes reference to an offscreen character who also mysteriously disappeared seasons earlier
- Referred to as "Hanging a lantern on it" in Stargate SG-1, "200", as the characters discuss an unlikely escape in a film script.
- In the original Movie, O'Neill's name only had one 'l' in it. After the change was noticed, the TV-O'Neill would occasionally make a point of the spelling of his name, as if he's been annoyed by having it misspelled before, hanging a lampshade on the mistake and providing a Ret Con by implying that the single-L version from the movie was just a mistake.
- He also makes repeated references to a Colonel O'Neil (one L) at the SGC who has "No sense of humour at all", lampshading the personality retool he underwent at the same time.
- In the Cop Show spoof Sledge Hammer, during a prolonged hostage situation in a mansion, the chief declares "Where the hell is he getting all this ammo!" about a hostage taker who has destroyed almost every vase in the room without reloading his revolver.
- Doctor Who, "Age of Steel": Mickey and Jake are looking for the transmitter controls, and Mickey asks what it looks like. Jake responds sarcastically that it'll have a sign with "Transmitter Controls" with big red letters on it. After a cut away and a couple of scenes, it cuts back to them, standing next to a metal box with "Transmitter Controls" written on it in big red letters.
- In the earlier Doctor Who episode "Pyramids of Mars", The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith hide from evil mummies in a priest hole (A hidden chamber). The Doctor rightly points out this is an anachronism, as the house is Victorian while priest holes are a relic of Elizabethan architecture. As he's doing this while attempting to hide, he is quickly shushed by his companion. Then again, Victorian architecture does often borrow from past eras, so it's not entirely far-fetched.
- "Silence in the Library" - One Word: "Spoilers
 "
- Also in a later episode, after asking what day it is: "Good. I like Saturdays." (Just in case it airs in the US on some other day... it's first shown in the UK on Saturdays. But you already knew that.)
- In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the Agatha Christy episode, Donna notices immediately, saying "a murder mystery at a party with Agatha Christy? it's like meeting Charles Dickens, at Christmas, with ghosts!", which also happened in another episode.
- In the Firefly episode "Objects in Space", the character Wash expresses his disbelief that someone could be psychic: "That sounds like something out of science fiction." When his wife, Zoë, responds with, "We live in a spaceship, dear," he says, "So?"
- In the Red Dwarf episode Quarantine, Lister, Cat, and Kryten are running from a deranged hologram who is shooting at them with "hex vision". Lister runs past the camera, surrounded by wild shots and explosions, and shouts, "Why don't we ever meet anyone nice?" Cat runs past behind him and says, "Why don't we ever meet anyone who can shoot straight?"
- The episode "Jack-Tor" of 30 Rock has a scene where Liz starts to decry using Product Placement, but is promptly interrupted by the other characters talking about how much they love Snapple (one of the sponsors of 30 Rock in real life).
- In the lonelygirl15 video "Truth Or Dare", the "random girl" asks, "Do you guys film everything?"
- One episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine had Worf and O'Brien reminisce about the "good ol' days" together on board the Enterprise. While talking about rescuing Captain Picard from the Borg, Worf noted that he felt they were like the old warriors of song, able to do anything, to which O'Brien interjects "Except keep the holodecks running", a sly remark to Star Trek The Next Generation's overuse of killer holodeck malfunctions.
- On that note, an episode of Star Trek Voyager features the Doctor daydreaming up various scenarios where he, naturally, gets to save the day. One such fantasy has Harry Kim panicking and declaring that "This is impossible! The warp containment field is failing!" - an old chestnut of a problem, long established as being up there with (and probably predating) the holodeck going crazy again.
- In the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", members of DS9 go back in time and encounter the events of the original series episode "The Trouble With Tribbles". When they are in the space station bar, Worf is asked why he looks different than the Klingons of that era. He merely growls that he doesn't want to talk about it. This is a Lampshade Hanging on the fact that the makeup for Klingons was changed to make them look less human in the later shows (And that the makeup had to be rebuilt after it was destroyed following their first appearance).
- Supernatural mocked several of its flaws/deliberate stylistic choices in "Hollywood Babylon". This exchange occurred between two producers:
Tara: Salt. Doesn't that sound silly? I mean why would a ghost be afraid of salt?
McG: Marty, what do you think?
Marty: I'm not married to salt. Are we still sticking with condiments?
McG: Mmm, it just sounds different, not better. What else would a ghost be scared of?
Marty: Maybe shotguns.
McG: That makes even less sense than salt.
- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip overused this trope at times. The worst example was in "The Harriet Dinner," which was a two-part episode that was nothing but cliches. Jordan and Danny, characters who'd been potential love interests, actually got locked on a roof together, and Danny said it seemed like something out of a bad sitcom. Sorkin's acknowledging it did not change the fact that it did, in fact, seem like a bad sitcom, and was by far the worst episodes of the series.
- In the "Spanish Inquisition" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus:
- The CSI episode of 2008-05-08, "Two And A Half Deaths," was one long series of lampshades being hung.
- Which is no surprise, considering that the writers of Two And A Half Men were doing the episode. The Two And A Half Men episode that week was also full of lampshade hangings, a result of the CSI guys doing that episode.
- This exchange from the KateModern episode "Who Killed Kate?":
Alice: Yeah, it's a bit far-fetched, isn't it?
Sophie: Well, no more than life-extending blood drinking rituals and secret world-controlling societies!
- The Middle Man and Side Kick Dubbie hang lampshades every chance they get.
- News Radio
- In the episode Stocks Jimmy James gives Beth a stock ticker and then says, "It's just like television, except without all those people doing stupid things to a fake laugh track."
- In the episode Kids Jimmy James is given a 555 phone number by a potential date, only to read the number after she's gone and proclaim, "Wait a minute, 555...that's one of those fake TV numbers!"
Anime
- In the English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh GX, characters have an unfortunate tendency to make ridiculous numbers of puns and gags based around their character concepts. In the second season, it's common for other characters to complain about this. (I.e., "Enough clock references!", "What's that supposed to mean?"/"Everything's a music reference to him, remember?")
- Half the humour in Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series is hanging lampshades on ridiculous plot points, poor character traits, screwing the rules due to money, excesses of Serious Business and gratuitous use of ancient Egyptian laser beams, among other things.
- In DBZ, and especially in the the first 9 movies, Piccolo is constantly saving Gohan in Big Damn Heroes moments. Constantly. So when Gohan is exhausted and about to be consumed by lava in movie 10, and Piccolo swoops in out of nowhere and carries him to safety, no one thinks anything of it. But then Gohan wakes up and realizes he had been hallucinating: it was Kuririn who saved him... while dressed up as Piccolo.
- In a recent episode of Naruto, Sai lampshades Naruto's tendency to exert a ridiculous amount of effort in training. Sai, while reading a book on friends, comes across Naruto practicing. After reading that "when your friends are working unusually hard on the job, it is nice to casually bring them a snack", he looks up to see Naruto using 1000 shadow clones to learn a new technique. Noting "Seems normal to me," he then bites into the apple he had been bringing for Naruto.
- Franky of One Piece fame occasionally makes statements to the effect of "This is the worst week ever!" or "Nothing can get me down this week," ostensibly lampshading the fact that One Piece is released in once-a-week installments. It's possible that this is simply a result of Franky's catch phrase-happy weirdness, though why someone would sort their moods into increments of week as many as three times during the space of an hour remains a mystery.
- This troper was always under the impression that the week references were implying that Franky does weekly modifications to his cyborg body, and for this reason considers himself a slightly different person each week.
- The Daughter Of Twenty Faces seems to enjoy hanging lampshades on many of its tropes, such as the relationship between the heroine and a junior member of the Gentleman Thief's gang, or the fact that the heroine is a bit young to be a cat burglar.
- Macross Frontier hangs lampshades in order to help subvert its tropes - the pretty boy main character is so pretty that his callsign and half-mocking nickname among his friends is Princess (to his chagrin); when Klein, a Zentraedi who has trouble with her "height" when human-sized, is teased by an old friend about it, the old friend jokes that if they ever got romantically involved the friend would probably get arrested for pedophilia.
- Kara no Kyoukai (despite all of its seriousness) does this when Mikiya comments that Toko's long philosophical lecture sounded like "something out of a cheap novel" - which it is, technically.
Film
- In Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, as Captain Barbossa reveals that he and his crew are undead skeletons, he announces, "You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You're in one."
- In the blaxploitation spoof I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, one of the small-time thugs has a shoot out with the main character, but ends up running out of ammo. However, the main character has plenty of ammo left. "Hold on a minute!! You just shot 12 times with a 6-shot revolver without reloading!!" The character smugly replies, "Whatcha gonna do about it?"
- In Snakes On A Plane, after Samuel L Jackson explains to his superiors that the bad guy has filled the plane with deadly snakes, the superior comments, "What kind of insane plan is that?"
- Perhaps the most delicious use of this is in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me:
Austin: "So, Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, presumably I could go back and look at my frozen self. But, if I'm still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the nineties and travelled back to the sixtiessssoooh no, I've gone cross-eyed."
Austin: "Yes."
- In The Forbidden Kingdom, Jason Tripitakas' last name is a lampshade hanging of his role as well as the story's roots in [1] (Tripitaka is a title of the monk Xuanzang, and as in the novel it's the other leads [Jet Li and Jackie Chan] that really make this story). For laughs, his being one of the only non-Chinese in the whole cast is lampshaded by Jet Li.
Jet Li: "He's the Seeker? He's not even Chinese!"
- In the 2008 Iron Man film, once Tony has come to accept that he's become a superhero, he proceeds to go on a little spiel describing in detail all of the trials he'll have to go through now, particularly identity crises and having to let the woman he loves in on it so she'll be up all night worrying about him. In short, all of the comic book movie cliches. And then magnificently subverts them by straight-out announcing his secret identity at a press conference.
- In Galaxy Quest, when an improbably destructive obstacle impedes two of the heroes' headlong rush to save themselves:
Gwen DeMarco: "What is this thing? I mean, it serves no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway. No, I mean we shouldn't have to do this, it makes no logical sense, why is it here?"
Jason Nesmith: "'Cause it's on the television show."
Gwen DeMarco: "Well forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was badly written!"
- Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Marshall Willenholly is being shot at by two female criminals.
Willenholly: Why are you shooting at me? I'm just a Federal Wildlife Marshall.
Chrissy: Two reasons. One: we're walking, talking, bad girl clichés.
Missy: And two: because you're a man.
Literature
- In the Thursday Next book Well Of Lost Plots a character explains that he covers up errors and inconsistencies within books, citing a method of saying "Hello, I'm a Hole, try not to think about it" - Lamp Shade Hanging Lamp Shade Hanging itself.
- Tanya Huff's Smoke and... series (so far, Shadows, Mirrors, and Ashes) features tropes at roughly one-per-page frequency, almost all lampshaded; the protagonist, along with most of his allies, works in television. Making a Vampire Detective Series, no less. Those few tropes that aren't lampshaded tend to be pretty meta already, thus:
"There's six kinds of hell breaking loose and heading this way."
"You've been waiting your whole career to say that, haven't you?" Amy asked, snickering.
- Mark E. Roger's Samurai Cat books use this trope so extensively that characters end up commenting on the lampshading itself, with lines like "I'm not comfortable with us noticing symbolism in our own stories".
- In the Xanth novel, Currant Events, an evil clone of Calliope, Muse of the Future mocks the real Calliope with insults about the stories she transcribes in her history tomes; insults that mirror real-life accusations critics have thrown at Piers Anthony (who seems to take a "Who cares if you don't like it" approach to criticisms.)
- In the Night Watch novel by Sergei Lukyanenko (composed of three novella-length short stories), there is a really nice example of lampshading. In the second novella (titled "Among his own kind") the main character, Anton Gorodietsky, an agent of the "Night Watch" of the title (a group of "Light Others" who keep an eye on Dark magicians and monsters, but without directly intervening against them) has been framed for the unlawful killings of a series of Dark magicians. At a certain point, he is running away, being hunted relentlessly by his enemies, when suddenly a car stops, the door opens so he can climb inside, and then drives away at speed. Anton thinks: "Things like this just don't happen! Heroes only get rescued by passing cars in cheap action movies."
- In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the villains turn out to be Snape and Malfoy. Of course, no one believes Harry when he says this, because they have been Red Herrings for every evil plot since book one.
- Perhaps this is more an example of Harry being the Boy Who Cried Wolf than a lampshade hanging?
- Well, we did find out in Book 7 that Snape STILL wasn't really a villain. Unpleasant, yes, and plenty self-serving, but ultimately heroic.
- Avoided in the Chronicles of Amber novel Prince of Chaos. At one point Merlin muses, "In a badly plotted story they'd have paused outside the doorway, and I'd have overheard a conversation telling me everything I needed to know about anything." The other characters do not pause, and the snatch of conversation Merlin overhears as they pass by is not useful to him.
- In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a judge investigating the murder "never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature."
- A Running Gag in Discworld novels is that million-to-one chances always pan out, and the characters are always aware of this. They'll even instruct those less aware that you have to say, loudly and clearly, that "It's a million-to-one chance, but it just might work!"
- And played with further in Guards! Guards!. When they're trying to shoot the dragon in it's voonerables, the Night Watch observe that particular point. When Carrot reckons that Fred just aiming and shooting at the voonerables has odds significantly better than million-to-one (thus making it a doomed proposition), he and Nobby add absurdity upon absurdity (like standing on one leg or stuffing a handkerchief in his mouth) to Fred's circumstances in order to engineer million-to-one chances of hitting the dragon in the right spot.
- No, they don't always pan out; just nine times out of ten. This becomes important when someone tries for their tenth million-to-one chance.
- Most of Harry Turtledove's Alternate History novels feature at least one scene of a character musing on how their lives could have turned out differently had history gone the way it did in the real world. They quickly conclude that it's not worth thinking about and they should focus on the world they actually live in.
- The Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls has a very subtle lampshadng of Just Between You And Me. The villain, a rogue Inquisitor named Ernst Stavros Killian, goes into a prolonged explanation of his plan to Cain toward the end of the book. Doesn't that name a little sound familiar?
- The Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers features Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest and a mystery novelist. Harriet and Peter have a number of conversations about how a given situation would be different if it were in a novel, including one in which Lord Peter remarks that no one complains how unlikely coincidences are when they happen in real life, but that fiction has to be plausible.
- In his book Be My Enemy, Christopher Brookmyre hangs a lampshade on Lampshade Hanging. After a corporate-type lampshades management-speak, one character notes that: "...taking the piss out of something was often a cheap way of buying your indulgence in it: you make one joke about it and people are less aware of how seriously you're taking it the rest of the time."
Western Animation
- Winx Club, "Homesick": Pixie Digit always thinks logically, so it's illogical for her to want to return to the pixie village (with the others), when it is part of a Big Bad plan designed to find the village. Tecna (her bonded fairy) addresses this, but the show never explains it.
- Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, "Foster's Goes To Europe": The show addresses why Mac should be going to Europe with his imaginary friends instead of his family. Coco gives the explanation, which makes it unintelligible.
- Jimmy Neutron, "The Junkman Cometh": The show treats the fact that you can't breathe in space this way. See The Un Reveal.
- Several episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles revolved around adding a new mutant to the cast (such as the Frogs), and the main characters, who were notorious for breaking the Fourth Wall, would comment on the seemingly unending stream of mutated characters they seemed to run into.
- One episode had one of the Turtles hang a lampshade on the fact that the episode's plot had meandered for about 20 minutes without bringing it any closer to a resolution, by telling the rest of the team "We'd better do something soon, or we'll have to show our first two-part episode!"
- Another episode had the turtles mention Shredder stealing energy for the Technodrome, to which Michealangelo would say 'Duh, they do that every episode'.
- And yet another episode neat the final seasons (after countless episodes where the Turtles have shut down the Technodrome) had the turtles sigh and say 'we know, we know' step-by-step how they'll sneak inside and shut down the Tehcnodrome, the same way they've had so many times before at this point.
- Another example has Shredder mention they kidnap April O'Neil... 'We've done it so many times before.'
- Quite popular in The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, usually accompanied by "this raises a lot of questions that we don't need to talk about,", and "It's best not to think about it."
- A list of all of the Lampshade Hangings that The Simpsons has done -- particularly in later seasons -- could probably be a website in and of itself. The Simpsons Archive has a long list of "meta-references."
- Futurama almost takes pride in doing this:
- In the Futurama episode "The Deep South", Zoidberg's house burns to the ground... underwater. Zoidberg wails "How could this have happened?" and Hermes notes, "That's a very good question." Implicitly claiming responsibility, Bender picks his still-lit cigar out of the ruins and puffs on it — eliciting a cry of, "That just raises further questions!"
- Amy harps on Fry and Bender for being lazy, making a point of Fry's beer belly. She turns her attention to Bender, pointing out that his "belly" is bloated and his door won't close. She pauses, then adds, "...and that doesn't even make sense."
- The Professor offers a long, elaborate, technically dubious, and absurd explanation for the appearance of "robot ghosts" in a castle, to which Hermes responds: "Of course! It was *SO* obvious!"
- "Yes, that sequence of words I said made perfect sense."
- After Bender is lost in space and hurled back to Earth by a god-like entity, he lands, unharmed, directly in front of Fry and Leela, who have been looking for him in the Himalayas. After Bender stands up, Leela announces that it is "by a wide margin the least likely thing that has EVER happened". (In the DVD commentary, the crew makes explicit reference to this being a lampshade hanging. "...And that's how we wrote our way out of THAT.")
- In the [2] episode Cartmanland, Cartman says, "You mean Kenny? He dies all the time!"
- Rocky And Bullwinkle:
Rocky: (recognizing Boris' voice) That voice. Where have I heard that voice before?
Bullwinkle: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
- After Marty McFly keeps running into various ancestors of Biff Tannen (traveling not only through time, but space as well!) in Back To The Future The Animated Series, he exclaims: "Is there a Tannen in every century?".
- The Animaniacs character Slappy Squirrel kept doing that, as part of her "retired toon actor" personality.
- In Ratatouille, Remy the Rat finds out that he can control Linguini's actions by pulling on his hair like a puppeteer. When Remy experiments with this unlikely technique, Linguini notes with amusement, "That's strangely involuntary."
- Megas XLR loves doing this through the use of signs, particularly with buildings about to be destroyed. Several include "Conveniently Empty Building," "This Building is Scheduled for Demolition Anyway," and "Explosions and Shrapnel Factory".
- Not to mention Coop's megaweapon button, which always reads something along the lines of: "Super Destructor Mode" or "Being Hit With A Giant Taser? Press Here". In one case the lampshade hanging is enormous: the same thing happens, and then a bit later during the same fight, Coop presses the button again, it reads: "Exactly the same button Coop just used like five minutes ago", but for an entirely different effect.
- Drawn Together is literally full of these types of jokes, frequently insulting the show itself for comedic effect. An example is in the episode "Little Orphan Hero", where Spanky, Princess Clara, Foxy, Toot, and Ling Ling try to help a suicidal quadriplegic end his miserable life. When said man reveals himself to be an undercover cop intending to arrest them for attempting to 'murder' him and that the entire area is surrounding by similar quadriplegic cops intending to arrest them, Spanky sighs and says, "This is so stupid, it's like some retarded 3rd grader wrote this."
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command does this on occasion.
Buzz: Of course, I should have known... the butler always did it.
- In Gargoyles, David Xanatos needed some way to lure the magical Coyote to him. To do this, he puts Goliath, Angela, Elisa and Bronx in a Death Trap to make the being intervene to save them. Xanatos and his robot loving describe the trap to the heroes and Xanatos cannot resist noting "It's my first stab at clichéd villainy; how am I doing?"
- Phineas & Ferb has a running gag based around this:
Random Person X: Aren't you a little young to be [Y]?
Phineas: Yes. Yes I am.
- Ed Edd And Eddy did this a few times, with Edd making a remark about Ed's "badly drawn fingers", and later with Eddy shouting, "Who writes his material?"
- Avatar The Last Airbender:
Katara: I need to borrow Appa.
Katara: Yes, it is.
Aang: Oh...
- Additionally, virtually the entire episode 'The Ember Island Players' qualifies under this trope.
Video Games
- This Zelda spoof on youtube has a lampshade reward after you beat a big mean evil lampshade bot... by unplugging him right away.
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: at one point, when faced with a Locked Door, Kyle Katarn, who has been in this kind of game before, snidely comments to the player character, "They always lock the doors. You'd think they'd've learned by now." and later, "The console for opening the door is probably hidden in some room twelve floors up... how does that make sense?"
- At one point in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Raiden asks Solid Snake why he never seems to run out of ammunition. In answer, Snake simply touches his bandanna and says "Infinite ammo." In the game, the bandanna is a secret item which does indeed grant infinite ammunition. While Snake is most likely referring to his mind, the joke is not lost on the player. The Metal Gear Solid series is famous for repeatedly breaking the fourth wall.
- In the original Metal Gear Solid, a lengthy description by Snake's mentor about how to walk without making noise ends with Snake frustratedly saying "I...can't do it!" referencing the fact that even though the game was designed for use with the Playstation's analog joystick-equipped Dual Shock controller, it's not possible to walk slowly in the game. In the Gamecube remake Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, it was possible to walk slowly and thus Snake's response to the instruction is changed accordingly.
- MGS3 perhaps features the most breakages of the forth wall and lampshading, exemplified by a conversation with Sigint regarding Snake's possession of The Boss's unique Patriot gun (acquired by starting a New Game Plus, and which logically should still be with The Boss), which Snake brushes off as "worrying about details"
- In the Lupino showdown stage of Max Payne, the title character finds out that Jack Lupino believes himself to be the herald of the end of the world, and this sets him to musing on clichés, both concerning the end of the world and his own persona as "a brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice." He ends with a musing on how "nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."
- Later on in the game, as he heads into an abandoned military bunker, Max muses on how he has taken on the role of the "Mythic Detective," with everything that taking on that role entails: "to unravel all the mysteries; following a path of clues to that Final Revelation, even if it would take me down to the cold, cavernous depths of a grave."
- There's also the hallucinatory dream sequence where Max's wife leaves him notes telling him that he's in a graphic novel (which, for the uninitiated, is how the cutscenes in the game are presented) and in a video game.
- In the A Bards Tale games, the character is featured repeatedly speaking to the narrator in debate of what he says, or simply because he feels it not necessary, commenting at various points on subjects like the lack of reason in wolves carring valuable items.
- The tutorial section is done from the mouth of a character and when told seemingly obvious things like how to jump, the bard mocks him for his ignorance and questions what the x button, etc. are.
- In the final chapter of Drakengard, after you are convinced they have no more weird left to shovel in your face, the Final Boss mission's description says "Reality breaks down, and the fantasy begins." And then it gets even weirder.
- Before the final boss fight of Final Fantasy VI, all of the main characters deliver a small speech about how love and friendship etc. have changed their lives, to which the villain replies, "This is pathetic! You sound like chapters from a self-help booklet!"
- Osmud Saddler, right before mutating into this giant spider-thing:Oh, I think you know. The "American prevailing" is a cliche that only happens in your Hollywood movies.
- Zork Grand Inquisitor lampshaded the Hyperspace Arsenal. When the player puts a large vacuum on a vending machine, Delboz comments "Just where were you keeping that?"
- In Doom III, the rationale for the player being able to acquire a chainsaw is a series of background logs detailing a shipment of chainsaws that were accidentally sent to Mars. The characters writing the logs draw attention to the fact that no one would ever use a chainsaw on the planet.
- In Unreal Tournament 3, the "flag" of CTF is replaced by the "FLaG" - Field-Lattice Generator. They look exactly the same, and one character says something to the effect of "it looks like a flag, it sounds like a flag, and it waves like a flag. It's a flag."
- A good example of this is in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Being predominately a platform-based game, it pokes fun at the idea that the answers to platform puzzles are rarely in the game it self which is radically different from RPG's and point-and-click adventure games. During this scene the princess you are traveling with is trying to read the books in the library while you are hopelessly trying to jump around the walls and move mirrors to direct light. Your character gets so annoyed with her that he asks, "Why don't you just look up the answer to this puzzle?" and she replies "This isn't that kind of game"
- In Freespace 2, during one of the missions, a pilot mutters about how useless their technology had been during the Great War, thirty years before, lampshading the fact that, while in Freespace 2, capital ships will fire all sorts of very large and deadly cannons and lasers, in Freespace 1, during which the Great War takes place, capital ships were for the most part fairly unimpressive moving targets.
Professional Wrestling
- On WWE Monday Night RAW, announcer Jim Ross lampshades the practice of putting weapons underneath the ring for the wrestlers to use, resulting in the page quote.
- One of the practices that led to World Championship Wrestling falling apart was its tendency to suspend wrestlers and then continue to pay them ridiculous salaries while they were at home and not working in the slightest. Near the end, the writers threw in a quip about it - the commissoner yelled at two misbehaving competitors, "I'm not going to send you home! If I do, someone at the office might pay you!"
Machinima
- From Red vs. Blue:
Church: "Poor Jimmy was the last one to go. Tex walked up to him, pulled Jimmy's skull right out of his head and beat him to death with it."
Tucker: "Wait a second... how do you beat someone to death with their own skull? That doesn't seem physically possible."
Church: "That's exactly what Jimmy kept screaming."
(Flashback)
Jimmy: (while being beaten to death with his own skull) "This doesn't seem physically possible!"
Church: "Why is it that something dramatic happens every five minutes? I can't be the only one noticing this."
Theater
Manga
- In at least one hentai manga, a character strains the local fourth wall to the limit when she asks "Why does everything always seem to entail ***ing John?" (Ironically, this editor was referred to it because it was such a blatant lampshade hanging, rather than the obvious reason.)
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga there's a short arc that consists of a long flashback of the Civil War against the Ishvalans. In it, the then-Captain Roy Mustang is talking to the then-Captain Maes Hughes when the latter receives a letter from his lover Gracia back in the Central City. As the family-enthusiastic he is, he gets overly emotional about the letter, to which Roy Mustang warns him that, in books and movies, the "family-type guy" is always the first to be killed. Especially blatant since Lt. Colonel Maes Hughes, who by then also has a three-year-old daughter he is overly passionate about, becomes the first important character to die in the series several issues before this flashback.
- In another hentai manga, one of Saigado's Yuri and Friends series actually had a character point out the 'censorship black dots' that covered the 'goods' commenting that 'it would feel even better if the black dot wasn't in the way!!'
- Yet another hentai manga, this time of Disgaea. Initially, Adell and Rozalin are just starting to go at it - and then one comments how this seems like such a bad porn plot... And then the camera zooms back on thePrinny Squad recording it. This troper thinks many a porn flick could be enhanced by such a random gag.
Web Comics
Radio
- Spike Milligan must have been peddling lampshades when he wrote the latter episodes of The Goon Show.
Web Original
- This is a relatively common occurance in Survival Of The Fittest, both in and out of character, this exchange shows a recent example of (IC) lampshading.
Melina Frost (leader of a group called the 'Poison Angels): “Go on then… show him why we’re called the Poison Angles.”
Jeff Marontate (a character facing the group): Poison Angles, huh? Oh, I'll give you a whole new set of angles in a minute, my darling.
Other
- In the children's book series Captain Underpants, the main characters Harold and George have commented on the unlikely plot events with, "It's like we're in a badly written children's book."
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