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Self-referential humor relies on a subject making light of itself in some manner. For example, a comedy play that featured the story of a group of fictional thespians attempting to put on a comedy play (as is the premise of Noises Off) would be fertile ground for self-referential humor. Because it can be subtle, it is often used instead of more obvious humor in places that aspire to be taken seriously.

Self-referencial humour is common in series television where the audience is expected to be familiar with the series. These jokes can often be overlooked by a viewer who is unfamiliar with the series. As an example, The Simpsons often makes self-referntial jokes. In one episode, where Lisa Simpson, who normally has an unrealistic hairstyle, goes to a salon and after seeing her new hairstyle, exclaims, "I finally look like a real person! Thanks!"

Self-referential humor is sometimes combined with breaking the fourth wall to explicitly make the reference directly to the audience, or make self-reference to an element of the medium that the characters shouldn't be aware of.

Software

Software is sometimes named with a humorous self-referencing or recursive acronym. The first, and most popular, case is the name of the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) project. Some other famous examples are WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator; LAME, for LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder; and PHP, for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. An extreme example is The Hurd, where "Hurd" refers to Hird of Unix Replacing Daemons, with "Hird" in turn referring to Hurd of Interface-Representing Depth.

See also

• self-reference
• indirect self-reference
• in-joke
• intertextuality

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