Staging the Audience: Magic Tricks

Continuing on these lines: What’s Up Between Cartoonist and Audience?

Perhaps the most prevalent assumption about filmed stories is that we the audience are looking in on, observing, actions and events taking place in some other world “over there” and that the people in that world have no idea that we exist. Sometimes such stories are provided with voice-over narration. The narrator speaks to us, but need not address us directly, and usually doesn’t.

Then we have “breaking the fourth wall,” where a character in a movie will speak directly to us, the audience. It is relatively rare, but it does happen. This, of course, temporarily destroys the illusion that we’re watching actions made by people off in some other world and who are oblivious to us. That’s why it isn’t done.

And then we have these cartoon shorts that are based on gags and that also seem relatively hospitable to, permeable to, breaking the forth wall. Characters will address us a half dozen or more times in a single seven minute short. As for as I can tell, audience address isn’t required in these shorts, it’s not inevitable, but it’s frequent and doesn’t destroy any illusion. The question is: Why?

As a comparison, consider a magic act. The magician, of course, must address the audience. He’s playing to us; that’s how stage acts work. The magician may even ask people in the audience to participate in the act in some way. Well, in the cartoon, we have gags instead of magic tricks. And we don’t know just when the gags will happen is just what they’ll be.

Now, a magic act may take place on stage, but it’s fundamentally different from a play. It’s playing with our sense of reality in a way that stories ordinarily do not. Something like that’s going on in the gag-based cartoon. They play with our sense of reality and the address to the audience is simply part of that play.