In theater there is a performance convention, which a Wikpedia article calls the Fourth Wall, where:
“…an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ‘wall’, the convention assumes, the actors act as if they cannot.”
The Fourth Wall also appears in cartoons and other types of storytelling. Sometimes it gets humorously broken, as in the August 3, 2021 Dilbert cartoon titled Dilbert Simulation, which has the following dialogue:
Pointy-haired Boss: I have a report that you were watching a cartoonist doing a live stream when you should have been working.
Dilbert: I’m practicing my religion. I believe a cartoonist is our creator, and reality is some kind of simulation.
Pointy-haired Boss: Does the creator love us?
Dilbert: No. He’s in it for the money.
It was followed by today’s cartoon, titled Cartoonist Runs The Simulation, which has this dialogue (and a last frame with an arrow flying towards the head of the Blue-shirt Guy):
Blue-shirt Guy: I hear you believe we live in a simulation created by a cartoonist. HaHaHaHa!!!! Cartoonists are idiots, and there’s no proof for your stupid theory.
Dilbert: There’s a good chance you’re about to die in a freak accident that is easy to draw.
Blue-shirt Guy: Absurd.
Another way to break the fourth wall is for the cartoonist to make himself a character in the comic, as Stephan Pastis did for the last frame in his August 1, 2021 Pearls Before Swine cartoon. Pastis also sometimes has his characters interact with other strips, as was described in a June 2, 2010 blog post at Finding Beauty in Ephemera titled Breaking the Fourth Wall of Comics.
There also is a literary device (with many subtypes) called the Story within a story.
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