THE FOURTH WALL.  That's what thespians call the barrier which separates their characters from the audience; the surface we can see through, though they can't see out.  And from the Ancient Greeks to Shakespeare's "play within a play" and the modern-day Matrix, as long as there's been a fourth wall, playwrights have experimented with breaking it down.

It takes a special kind of chutzpah, though, to work fourth-wall chicanery into what is essentially a farce.