So I was watching this old episode of SNL, from May of '87, back when It's Garry Shandling's Show was still running on Showtime. (My dad was a fan of the show in those years, by the way, making Shandling's show the first quality TV I was ever even exposed to. I was almost ten years old by then. The kids today have no idea how lucky they are.) Shandling flagrantly, and repeatedly, broke the fourth wall in his show, and not in ways that were always gimmicky and excessive. Usually it was fresh and imaginative, and this was when the greatest precedent for the practice was Woody's classroom flashback in Annie Hall (admittedly a good one). I wasn't expecting Shandling to break the fourth wall on SNL, which goes to show just how dense I can sometimes be, in spite of all my culture-consumption and SNL-analysis over the years--or is that because of them? Anyway, he broke the fourth wall---he broke it all the way down. And it was triumphant. It was Garry Shandling's show, even if it wasn't It's Garry Shandling's Show.
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