The "fourth wall" violations in pop entertainment seem to me more to reflect the influence of clowning, vaudeville, commedia dell'arte, and ultimately folk humor traditions, rather than to achieve any Brechtian effect. Indeed these moments often create a form of identification, by making the audience a participant in humor, or the butt of the joke. Some other instances of "fourth wall violations" to consider that occur to me: Aristophanes' comedy, where characters will look out in the audience and make remarks like "Yes, there really are lots of fornicators," and where the chorus, in the part of the play known as the parabasis, will directly address the audience with advice from the playwright about how to judge the play and how to run the city. And second, how about the Marx Brothers? Groucho especially directed remarks to the audience, and sometimes even more, as in his parody of O'Neill's _Strange Interlude_, which pops up for no particular reason in _Animal Crackers_ (I think that's the one). These violations of the fourth wall seem to me to accomplish no distantiation at all. Instead, it's as if there are comic "forces of nature" loose in the world--Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and the Aristophanic heroes like Strepsiades, Pisthetairos, etc.--and the audience sometimes is welcomed into their activities by them. This ain't Brechtian at all. It's still illusionistic, it promotes (false and reassuring) ideas of the restoration of order by working out conventional denouments, the characters remain real--even across films and plays. So it does not seem a bit Brechtian to me. (I think there are ways it might fit Marcuse better, in providing a utopian alternative to what's out in the audience's "real world.") For something Brechtian, check out the films of Straub and Huillet (_Not Reconciled_, _The Comedian, the Pimp and the Whore_, or their masterpiece filming of Schoenberg's opera _Moses and Aron_. This opera is an unknown masterpiece of reflection on the relations between politics and representation, and in their film Straub and Huillet seek to present it in a Brechtian way.). Keith Nightenhelser, DePauw University ([log in to unmask])