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The fourth wall

proscenium theater, Denis Diderot nineteenth century theatre realism box set suspension of disbelief

Critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as "that invisible screen that forever separates the audience from the stage."

In A.R. Gurney's The Fourth Wall, a quartet of characters deal with housewife Peggy's obsession with a blank wall in her house, slowly being drawn into a series of theatre clichés as the furniture and action on the stage become more and more directed to the supposed fourth wall.

Breaking the fourth wall
"Breaking the fourth wall"

metatheatre

a character directly address the audience (one example is the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town).

A similar effect can be achieved by having characters interact with objects outside the context of the work (e.g., a character is handed a prop by a stage hand).

Another, by Paul from Funny Games; looking at the audience while Anne, the protagonist of the film is searching for her dog.

Bertolt Brecht was known for deliberately breaking the fourth wall to encourage his audience to think more critically about what they were watching, referred to as Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect").

Works which break or directly refer to the fourth wall often utilize other post-modern devices such as meta-reference or breaking character.

In the early days of non-silent motion pictures, the Marx Brothers' stage-to-screen productions often broke this barrier. In their 1932 film Horse Feathers, for example, when Chico sits down at a piano to begin a musical interlude,  Groucho turns to the camera and deadpans "I've got to stay here, but there's no reason why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby until this thing blows over."

In 1921 premiere of Pirandello's play Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), wherein six ordinary people come to the rehearsal of a play to demand that their stories be told as part of the performance.

The fourth wall is sometimes included as part of the narrative, when a character discovers that they are part of a fiction and 'breaks the fourth wall' to make contact with "the real world", as in films like Tom Jones (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1963), Woody Allen's Annie Hall (with Marshall McLuhan) and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Last Action Hero

George Burns commonly addressed the audience in his 1950s TV comedy show.

Mel Brooks frequently breaks the fourth wall in his movies for comedic effect.

Bernie Mac broke the fourth wall during scenes in which he reflects on family life in The Bernie Mac Show.

The fourth wall is frequently broken in cartoons, often in very imaginative ways difficult or impossible with live actors. Perhaps one of the most humorous is to "fight the iris", i.e, right before the picture ends and while the image gradually is diminished by a contracting circle, a character uses his hands or body to force the "eye" open in order to interject a wry comment or complaint. (Often the iris seems to stretch and go out of shape like pliant rubber during this stunt.) Often this technique is combined with physical comedy, e.g. having the iris snap back into shape and painfully pinch the person's nose or finger for their trouble. Warner Bros. directors like Bob McKimson and Tex Avery used the gag to good effect in the forties and fifties, and many modern cartoon directors have adapted it.

A moment of breaking the fourth wall occurs in the DC Comics occurs with the villian the Joker addresses the reader outside of the comic book. The other characters present in the story just ignore his behavior as he is obviously insane.