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alt title(s): Take That Me; Take That Us; Self Deprecating Humor 
Rodney Dangerfield, this trope's patron saint.
There is no Jewish conspiracy to control the banks. You know why? Because we can't agree on a place to go for dinner! We couldn't even get the meeting started! (in an authoritative voice) "All right, the Jewish meeting to control the banks will now commence." (in a grouchy voice) "Hey, who died and made you king? Never mind me. I'm no one here. I have no opinions."
He had the kind of face only a mother could love, if that mother was blind in one eye and had that kind of milky film over the other...but still, he was my identical twin.
Sure we all have egos to some degree, save for severe psychological problems, but sometimes you just may not feel like being self centered, or ethnocentric or nationalistic. Sometimes you may just feel like cracking a joke that says, "Ha! Take That, Me!" or "Take that, Us!" This is the essence of self-deprecation.
This doesn't always work, though. Make these jokes in front of those actually feeling in those aforementioned moods, and they won't see the joke. You may get accused of being "self hating" or even a "traitor". This, of course, means that oppressive regimes are right out, unless those jokes are too ingrained in the culture (like in Soviet Russia ...Oh, sorry, I was expecting a joke there).
The reasoning behind using humor in this way varies between media but will most of the time be used to relax the audience and let them know that your comedy isn't laser targeted towards one group. (unless Take That Me is a staple of your comedy)
Note that this isn't about whether other people are allowed to make fun of you. Those would be different tropes (related to N Word Privileges). Nor is it Heroic Self Deprecation, which is actually putting yourself down for real.
See also Biting The Hand Humor, Self Parody. Stop Being Stereotypical is the serious version of this trope.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Stan Lee has remarked that Spider-Man regular J. Jonah Jameson was based off of how he imagined the fans viewed him: a cantankerous, money-hungry old man. Of course, most comics fans see Lee as an affable grandfather figure, so in this case the Self Deprecation didn't quite work.
- Well, at least, that's how Alan Moore sees him.
- Jack Kirby's opinion of him is obvious with his conniving supporting character in Mr. Miracle, Funky Flashman.
- In Marc Guggenheim's Civil War: Choosing Sides, Mac Gargan is is discussing selling his life story. He wants Guggenheim to do the movie, then says "No, the other Guggenheim, the one who wrote that hockey movie", simultaneously putting down Marc himself, and giving a Shout Out to his brother Eric.
- Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen's early-2000's resurrection of The Defenders. In addition to portraying its principal characters as supreme Jerk Asses who eventually decide to take over the world so it won't need to be defended (and, more importantly, so they won't have to deal with one another), the series invoked Stylistic Suck via references to Marvel's incredibly goofy Silver Age giant monster comics, and one of its covers proudly boasted a Wizard Magazine quote proclaiming The Defenders to be "the worst comic ever produced."
- French cartoonist Gotlib never misses an opportunity to make fun of his own limits as an artist. For example, while discussing the Italian westerns, he drew a typical protagonist of such films which suspiciously looked like a famous actor... And commented it with "Any ressemblances with Clint Eastwood would be one hell of a fluke." A jab at his (according to him) poor skills in caricaturing real persons.
- Jhonen Vasquez, big time. Johnny The Homicidal Maniac is a huge source of Old Shame, one Squee comic sends the titular character on a rant about how sometimes it seems like his life is controlled by a "suckish cartoon guy who can't draw", and one Invader Zim DVD commentary track has one member of the voice cast remark that "Jhonen is genius, although I couldn't say that in front of him because he'd beat me up or something." Hell, back when he was planning on making a movie (whatever happened to that?) he said it'd be "Coming soon to a bargain bin near you."
- During J Michael Straczynski's run on Spider-Man, one comic included a security guard mocking Babylon 5.
- Two Words: Mad Magazine
- Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost put a grave of "Kyle Yost" in one of their comics.
Literature
- Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear introduces the setup early in the book for a ridiculous tongue-twisting punchline much later. One character comments on what an elaborate setup that was for such a lame joke and the other sadly agrees, "I don't know how he gets away with it."
- Fforde has nothing on Robert Rankin, who constantly breaks the fourth wall to self-complain about plot holes, stupid running gags, and absolutely ridiculous plot devices (Elvis with a time-traveling sprout in his head has to kill the Antichrist! Yeah!). At one point he actually inserted himself, writing the novel in a bar, in the novel itself.
- Sherlock Holmes can be surprisingly self-deprecating, probably partly to balance out Watson's undying praise of his abilities. Of course, Holmes sincerely seems to believe that his powers of observation aren't anything special, and while he accepts praise and admiration he is a bit embarrassed by it all.
- Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, indulges in this frequently. Occasionally he does it consciously in order to cultivate an image of modesty amongst his peers, but his own personal memoirs (i.e. the novels) are a genuine and much more scathing example.
- The Cairo Jim books (starring a Captain Ersatz slash Affectionate Parody of Indiana Jones) by Geoffrey McSkimming regularly quote negative reviews on the back cover...a subversion, because said negative reviews are always written by the author himself from the perspective of the books' main villain.
- In one of the books of the Tamuli, David Eddings takes the opportunity to have one of the heroes describe heroic fantasy as being written by sub-par authors. Guess which genre contains vast numbers of very thick books with the name "Eddings" prominently emblazoned on the cover?
- Chaucer does this all the time; many of his dream poems include a moment (or three) where his Author Avatar narrator is castigated for being fat, dorky, and a writer of love poetry although he doesn't get any himself, and in The Canterbury Tales his pilgrim persona, when it's his turn to tell a tale, tells first a mock-romance that's so silly that the Host cuts it off before he can finish, and then a long, boring moral tale. This makes the trope at least Older Than Print.
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy features, as a running plot thread, a dialogue between a book reviewer and his editor about a book full of "conspiracy nonsense" and "gratuitous sex scenes" which seems to strongly parallel the novel itself.
- It's actually between an editor of a magazine, and a critic writing a review of the novel. And the dialogue ends up also mocking critics, as the critic in question outright admits that he never actually has the time to read the books he reviews, but he "skims them thoroughly", and the editor doesn't mind, as long as the text is entertaining.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (from Mostly Harmless):
- "'It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what's that strange thing you British play?' 'Er,' said Tricia, 'cricket? Self-loathing?' 'Parliamentary democracy.'"
- DanBrown in The Lost Symbol - Robert Langdon refers to a book hevily implied to be DigitalFortress as a "mediocre thriller".
- Isaac Asimov's Azazel and Black Widowers stories often had his characters insulting him. It's especially egregious in the former, as those stories always begin with the author having lunch with a character named George, who constantly insults him — and then proceeds to run out on the check (sometimes even borrowing money from Asimov) at the end of the story.
- In the forward to one of the Black Widowers stories, he acknowledged that when he portrayed the character of Manny Rueben as constantly insulting his "friend" Dr Asimov ("Just because I lend him some money, that makes him a friend?") the person he was really being unfair on wasn't himself but Lester del Rey (who Rueben was based on).
Live Action TV
- The third season of Veronica Mars had quite a bit more Product Placement put in it by creator Rob Thomas than previous seasons. In the second-to-the-last episode ever, after two Product Placements in a row, this conversation happened:
Mac: Hey, did anyone else hear there's gonna be a Matchbox 20 reunion show? Piz: So? Rob Thomas is a whore. Mac: Yeah.
- X Play used to beat this trope into the ground. It's one of the reasons why This Troper grew tired of it and stopped watching.
- It does it to the point where if one watches it long enough, he or she can easily pick out when a joke will pop up. They're usually predictable too. Hardy har har, X Play, Adam wants to kill himself.
- It pretty much happens every time any of the male hosts opens his mouth, excluding Mr. Sark.
- An episode of The Daily Show featured Lewis Black talking about how we shouldn't let celebrities teach us political views. For examples, he shows pictures of Tom Cruise, Oprah...and himself.
- Also when he discusses the Jews, although this may be more related to N Word Privileges.
- Even House has a surprising amount of these, considering that he's got a huge ego and calls himself 'almost always eventually right'. While he's very sure of his medical and observational skills, he shows much deprecation on the other aspects of his life. He calls himself a 'lonely misanthropic drug addict' and says he should've died in the bus crash instead of Amber. He once tells Cameron that she wants to date him only because he's damaged. The man obviously has huge issues of self-worth.
House: You don’t love, you need. And now that your husband is dead, you’re looking for your new charity case. That’s why you’re going out with me. I’m twice your age, I’m not great looking, I’m not charming, I’m not even nice. What I am, is what you need. I’m damaged.
- Hell, his own subconscious is positively nasty to him, especially here:
Hallucination Amber: (as House is (hallucinating) detoxing with the help of Cuddy, and spots a Vicodin pill lying on the floor) You're pathetic. If you want the pill, just send her home. But you can't because that would be admitting defeat to her. Now, this is interesting. If you take the pill, you don't deserve her. If you secretly take the pill, you don't deserve anyone.
- Colin Mochrie of Whose Line Is It Anyway often makes jokes about his own baldness.
- Of course, everyone else also often makes jokes about his baldness...
- "World's Worst person to be stuck on a desert island with." Drew Carey was the first to pick a role...as himself.
- A recent episode of CSI had a victim who was working on a "darker and edgier" version of a cheesy sci-fi show. In one scene, a fan shouts "YOU SUCK!" at the victim. That fan was played by Ronald D. Moore, executive producer of the darker and edgier 'Battlestar Galactica remake.
- In the Arrested Development episode "Spring Breakout" the program Scandalmakers is described thusly by Ron Howard's narration:
- "Due to poor acting, the burden of the story was placed on the narrator. [...] He was actually found in a hole near the house, but this inattention to detail was typical of the laziness the show's narrator was known for. [...] Real shoddy narrating, just pure crap."
- "In fact, Mr. Attell was portraying Tobias' actual never-nude affliction, but this perplexed the Scandalmaker's audience due to the unfocused nature of the narrator's explanation."
- Later in the episode, "Notice it wasn't something the narrator said."
- The Muppet Show often engaged in this.
- From the Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine":
Lister: (sighs) We're a real Mickey-Mouse operation, aren't we?
Cat: Mickey Mouse!? We ain't even Betty Boop!
- Back to Earth has a character criticise the fictional show's use of Psi-Scan.
- Although given the Psi-Scan's response, this may have been more Take That, critics...
- When James May joined Top Gear in the second season, Jeremy Clarkson introduced him as a "complete imbecile." May then presented a segment about how no intelligent person would buy a luxury car out of a magazine just to say he owned one — and then showed off his own Bentley T2, admitting he'd bought it so he could own a Bentley and faithfully listing all the ways it had made his life worse.
- The show itself has the motto of "Top Gear - Ambitious but rubbish!".
- In the New Zealand series Pulp Sport, every third episode has some sort of reference to them being derivative and terrible, while every season finale ends with Bill and Ben being Fired.
- I'm plenty self-loathing; it has nothing to do with being Jewish.
- The entire concept of Wormhole X-Treme as a Show Within A Show for Stargate SG-1 exists solely to make fun of themselves. Includes the concept of the Zat disintegrating things (long since ret conned in the actual show) and the question of why exactly, someone who is "out of phase" can stand on the floor and sit in chairs (reused years later)
Music
- Ska band Reel Big Fish used to sell T-Shirts proclaiming "I Hate Reel Big Fish." And their most popular track was called "Sell Out"
- Likewise, Oasis began selling 'Quoasis' t-shirts when their rivals Blur compared them to Status Quo.
- Primus Sucks. By which I mean they're awesome.
- Mindless Self Indulgence frequently insult themselves. If you see anyone in a shirt that says "MSI sucks", they're probably a fan.
- They Might Be Giants' fifth album John Henry included pictures in the liner notes of children waving signs that said "We hate They Might Be Giants." Seeing as this was the first album where the Johns were accompanied by a full band, quite a few fans did.
- Toad The Wet Sprocket is the ultimate cure for insomnia!
- KMFDM's albums usually contain one song in this vein. The straightest example, of course, would be "Sucks" from Angst.
- Other rock stars bragg about the size of their respective members, but not Mark Mc Grath of Sugar Ray. He brags about his smallness, and is reportedly the least endowed man in the business.
- Flight of the Conchords typically open their live performances by describing themselves as New Zealand's "second/third most popular nobelty music band". The most popular New Zealand novelty music band is a Flight of the Conchords tribute band.
- For one of the biggest acts in pop history, The Beatles were remarkably prone to this. One 1963 interview has John saying they'll be lucky to last three months, Paul extremely certain they won't still be performing these songs at 40, George hoping he owns his own business "by the time we do flop," and Ringo speculating that he'll end up owning a hair salon.
- In a 1982 interview George was asked to describe himself, and freely answered "a middle-aged ex-pop star."
Newspaper Comics
Radio
- Im Sorry I Havent A Clue lived and breathed this trope, with the late Chairman Humph being baffled that anyone was listening to this rubbish.
- Most comedy shows on American public radio generally make fun of public radio, as being too liberal, too erudite, too boring, or what have you.
- Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion relies on self-deprecating humor all the time, most famously by discussing the foibles of rural Minnesotans, but also referring to himself as having "a face made for radio", referring to the show as "this job I picked up on the weekends", and so forth.
- Much of Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant's radio show consisted of them expressing amazement at how bad the show was and apologizing to the listeners (or suggesting that there no longer were any). They usually blamed Karl, particularly if he was in charge of a feature like Rockbusters or Monkey News, but also for the long stretches of silence that would sometimes follow if he was asked a question. They also got a kick out of reading the abusive emails they got from hostile listener Richard Anderson ("Dickers!")
Tabletop Games
- It's tradition in game rulebooks to include a page or so showing how the game is played. In the "Obligatory Example Of Play" (yep, that's what they called it) in "Lucha Libre Hero" one of the players, "Steve" is clearly not getting the point of the game. His character, El Heraldo de Justicia, is described as a "dark-clad avenger of the night", and "Steve" spends most of his actions trying to get his hands on a gun despite the fact that a luchador can do more damage in this game with his wrestling moves. Steve Long, part-owner of Hero Games, and incidentally the guy who edited "Lucha Libre Hero", got his start as a game designer with the book "Dark Champions", which focused on gritty Punisher-style vigilante action. The flagship character for "Dark Champions" and Steve's very own player character is the Harbinger of Justice. (The section wraps up with "Editor's Note: I do so have a gun.")
Theatre
Video Games
Webcomics
- This Sluggy Freelance strip joked that a (fictional) wrongful hiring scandal had drastically hurt the strip's viewership. "Two people used to read Sluggy Freelance. Now only one does. In percentage terms, this is devastating for the comic."
- In this Order Of The Stick, one of the demon roaches says, "They'll let any old hack write a sourcebook these days" in reference to the strip's acid-breathing shark. The acidborn template, with the specific example of the acidborn shark, appears in the Dungeons And Dragons sourcebook Dungeonscape, co-written by OotS author Rich Burlew.
- Which begs the question of whether Rich first dreamed up the acid-breathing shark for his webcomic, and included it in the sourcebook merely to lay the groundwork for his Take That Me...
- Similarly, Halting State by Charles Stross has a scene in a Dungeons And Dragons-based MMORPG, where the characters fight a slaad (i.e., a giant chaos frog) and then discuss what a ridiculous monster it is. Stross wrote the magazine article for 1st-edition D&D that slaadi originally appeared in.
- Katie Teidrich notes that Self Deprecation is the best way to get undying praise, any real artist's bane.
- Josh Lesnick, in response, obliged by offering advice on how to improve her puppy-kicking technique.
- Eskimo Bob did this with "Eskimo Sucks".
- Something Positive occasionally features Choo-Choo Bear "off-stage" to address the reader directly, declaring that his author is a lazy, talentless hack who can't get his act together.
Choo-Choo Bear: Alas, dear readers, you know when you see me Randy is planning something "special." It'll be over quickly, I promise. ... And if you hate it, don't worry. It's not like this will be the project Mr. "I swear I'll update Midnight Macabre" will actually finish."
- Jayden and Crusader embodied this trope for much of its early stages. Later the self-deprecation slackened a little, but it's still there.
- This Dominic Deegan strip has Mookie poking fun at his own inability to draw noticeably different faces.
- Polk Out tends to rely on self-depreciating humor.
- Phil and Kaja Foglio's Hugo Award acceptance speech.
- Al Schroeder did it twice in Mindmistress, making fun from his artwork.
- See the title of this El Goonish Shive comic.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Avatar The Last Airbender takes a few shots at itself in "The Ember Island Players", where the Gaang goes to see play done in tremendous detail about everything that happened to them since Aang's awakening. In an early episode (The Great Divide), the group stopped at canyon and wound up trying to resolve the differences between two feuding clans. Many fans felt it was the worst episode in the series. In the play when the actors playing them spot the canyon they point out its existence... and then decide not to stop and just keep going.
- There's also Sokka saying that whether or not Jet died wasn't very clear.
- Matt Groening has occasionally taken shots at himself, including having his Life In Hell comics have coffee deflected onto them from a superior comic, showing himself willing to sign anything at a comic convention, and having Homer insult his work being in an art gallery.
- South Park's "Cartoon Wars", a two episode-long Take That towards Family Guy, takes a couple jabs at itself when a stranger drops Kyle off to save Family Guy, "I know the show is just joke after joke with no structure, but I kinda like that. At least it's not all preachy and up its own ass with messages, you know?"
- Ironically, Family Guy has become the one of the two that is "preachy and up its own ass with messages."
- That really depends on which episode. "Not All Dog's go to Heaven", "420", "FOX-y Lady","You May Now Kiss the... Uh... Guy Who Receives", and possibly "Boys do Cry" fit the label. Other episode's tend to have Brian dropping comments that point to Seth MacFarlane's political views but do not really affect the episode's plot. South Park has frequently in 13 years had them be the whole point. Real life comments by Matt and Trey also undercut the feeling they can acknowledge that while they dislike Family Guy, their own show is not as deep as they want to believe, which undercuts even their valid arguments somewhat.
- Family Guy doesn't even try to make valid points; they're strategy is to make their own message look good by viciously attacking grotesque caricatures of whoever they don't like.
- In the episode where Stan and Kenny go to Mel Gibson to get their money back for The Passion Of The Christ, Stan says "This is just like when we got our money back for BASEketball," a film by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
- Find a Drawn Together episode in seasons 2 and 3 that doesn't do this. Try.
Real Life
- Jewish humor is strongly tied with this.
- Tom Lehrer has done this too, being a Jew — most notably in his song, "National Brotherhood Week".
All the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews.
- He also included quotes from negative reviews on his album covers.
- One of his favourites is from the New York Times: "Mr Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste."
- One of his albums is titled "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer".
- Woody Allen uses this throughout his work, most often against himself but occasionally against Jews or New Yorkers generally. For instance, from Annie Hall:
Alvy: Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I LIVE here.
- As you can see from the page quote, Jon Stewart is a big fan of this. Like other Jewish comedians, he makes fun of his "Jewish-ness" as well as making fun of his, uh, lacking in height, his pear-shaped physique and the fact that he hasn't been in very successful movies and these jokes carry over to The Daily Show. Even The Daily Show itself is a victim as one of the longest Running Gags in the program was for a guest to mention how they've seen The Daily Show and for Jon Stewart to say that he himself doesn't care for it.
- Sacha Baron Cohen, who is Jewish, plays the casually antisemitic Borat in the eponymous movie and his TV shows.
- Yiddish humour frequently takes this to an extreme, in fiction (most notably the works of Sholom Aleichem) and especially in local sayings that are modified, more narcissistic versions of Old Testament and Talmud quotes. One particular favourite of this troper's is "mentsch tracht, Gott lacht" (roughly translates to "mankind suffers, and God laughs").
Tevye: God, I know that we are Your chosen people, but sometimes, can't You just choose someone else?
- Mexican humor also has a quite generous serving of self-deprecation.
- CPT. Colored People Time. Runs roughly between 1 - 6 hours slower than normal time.
- David Letterman does quite a lot of this.
- Corner case: Jay Leno routinely makes jokes about the badness of his jokes. These are often among his funnier jokes.
- Brits have a reputation for it. (It's the only joke we know)
- This is cartoonist Robert Crumb's favorite subject.
- No episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien goes without it. Usually he's joking about his hair and/or awkward body.
- Or that his jokes aren't funny, even though most of the time they are.
- It is a common device he uses to save a joke that gets a bad reaction, though.
- Many of Craig Ferguson's jokes are about how nobody watches his show, and that the audience only applauds because they have been given free candy.
- And are only there because they couldn't get into The Price is Right (which, admittedly, might actually be true, since they tape in the same building).
- Or that he had to replace them with a laugh track, because no one would ever actually watch his show...
- The opening screenshot of this software review shows a few open source developers have this sense of humor.
- This is probably the reason why redneck jokes are popular in the Deep South.
- Will Rogers' frequently quoted line, "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
- "Well, you've done it again. You've wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk."
- Hugh Laurie has been known to do this, oh, all the fricking time.
- He even once mentioned that reason he keeps acting is because he hates himself and doesn't believe he deserves to be happy.
- The original ads for the Volkswagen Beetle constantly mocked the car for its small size. Allegedly this violated one of the unwritten rules of advertising, "Don't mock the product." The ad campaign was a smash success.
- Volkswagen has used this fairly often, including in this ad for the Karmann Ghia sports car. "It's the most economical sports car you can buy. It's just not the most powerful."
- Recent Skoda ads have played on their reputation by having people see a new Skoda and refuse to believe that such a great car could be made by such an awful company. The tagline is "It's a Skoda. Honest."
- Skoda, incidentally, are owned by Volkswagen.
- It is a common feature in Filipino humor to make fun of our reputation for procrastination and lateness (known among Filipinos as "Filipino Time"). Another common self-depreciating Filipino joke is to comment on the unstable political environment (yet another attempted coup/political rally/corruption scandal?) of the Philippines or to make fun of the almost religiously fanatical celebrity-worship tendencies of Pinoy Pop Culture.
- They must be pretty fanatical fans. This Catholic editor finds the Filipino willingness to crucify themselves a tad unnecessary.
- Only devotees from a certain part of the country do that. Most of the rest of us find it, in your words, "a tad unnecessary" as well and really don't like being lumped in with said extreme devotees.
- A big part of Icelandic humor, common factors include bad driving habits, cutting in lines, extremely frequent bodily noises and a dumb Icelandic tourist attempting to speak English but constantly peppering his language with Icelandic-exclusive idioms (Venus pronounced as "weenis" and riding on horseback replaced by "fucking", I kid you not.)
- The slogan for The Comedy Network, Canada's equivalent of Comedy Central, is 'Time Well Wasted.'
- Old Hungarian joke: "If two Hungarians are in a room, they'll have three opinions."
- There's a similar joke about rabbis and theological positions. It's probably one of those "fill in your favorite target" jokes.
- Stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan interrupts his act frequently to make disapproving comments (in a different voice) about his jokes.
- Likewise Craig "The Lovemaster" Shoemaker:
Mr. Erase: Oh my god, that was so disgusting! What a visual! I am so sorry. Erase, erase, erase!
- Eddie Izzard does this too, often when he forgets where he was going with a joke.
- The TV Tropes website has itself admitted it isn't immune to things like Flanderization and Misaimed Fandom by having examples on their own pages. There's also the Laconic pages, which is pretty much the site mocking itself for having such lengthy articles. There's also the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game which mocks itself relentlessly.
- Two Words: Valve Time
- On that note, CCP Games knows only one release date: Soon™.
- NCSoft (now Paragon Studios) has apparently licensed this term from CCP.
- And Blizzard Entertainment. It seems that successful game companies that can afford to push back release dates for the sake of quality have come to use Soon™ as a way of mocking both themselves and their fans.
- Michael Bay is known to indulge in a bit of this, a good example being this commercial.
- Ben Affleck, when hosted Saturday Night Live, joked that he would be endorsing John McCain in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election because every candidate he ever supported lost.
- Affleck in general just loves making fun of himself.
- The British channel E4 is mostly composed of British soap operas, American drama and comedy,and reality tv. Its advertising is pretty much entirely mocking the melodrama of British soaps and American drama (as well as how the latter can be heavily focused on a middle-aged female audience), the ridiculousness of American comedy, the stupidity of reality tv (even referring to it as television to turn your brain off to) and itself for broadcasting them.
- Billy Mays's commercial for ESPN360.com is a parody of his infomercials.
- The entire Goth subculture is essentially one large self-deprecating, self-aware, decidedly ironic in-joke. Part of that joke is that you can single out the poseurs by noting who actually takes it seriously.
- Irish humour, when it's not about drinking, fighting, or religious conflict; is all about the Irish predilection for drinking, fighting, and religious conflict.
- Russian Humor tends to gravitate towards this also (ethnic humour tends to deprecate everyone else as well). Actually, is there any modern culture that doesn't have this as a large part of its humour?
- Latinos take themselves pretty damn seriously.
- Well, Gabriel Iglesias has been known to take some shots at his own culture from time to time. Oh, and
fat fluffy people, too.
- Okay, yeah, he's in the trope pic and all, but how the hell does Rodney Dangerfield not get mentioned in the actual entry?! The man's the patron saint of this trope for a reason. His entire act was entirely made up of self-directed Take Thats. He really does get no respect.
- The fact that he was able to make an entire career off of this trope really does command respect.
- The basis of the whole Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Bill Engall, Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy all focus on aspects of themselves and their family, then make as many redneck jokes about it as they can. Ron White might count, but it's hard to tell with him.
- Since Larry's a fictional character -played by a Midwesterner, no less- his isn't exactly self-deprecating since the real Daniel Lawrence Whitney never shows up in the act.
- Few people enjoy the "Scots are cheap" stereotype as much as Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. "My uncle once dropped ten pence; he bent over to pick it up, and it hit him in the back of the head."
- Kevin Smith describes his wife as a man-hating feminist, "which explains why she married the guy with the tiniest dick on the planet."
- SNL's Chris Farley's humor was all about this trope.
- Bill Hicks, who grew up in the South, based a lot of his material on the kind of idiots who live in the South.
- No, he took the "everyone's an idiot but me" approach, which is the polar opposite of Self Deprecation.
- Brian Regan uses this in a lot of his comedy acts as well, usually to make him look stupid. The best example is his skit "Stupid in School"
Teacher: Brian, what's the "I before E" rule?
Brian: Uh... um... I before E... Always...
- Anyone from Cleveland. Because we suck.
- Talking heads lambasting the Main stream media...while appearing on FOX, MSNBC or CNN. Debatable whether or not they see the irony in this.
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