Lampshades hung in the real world.
General examples:
- For pages about tropes, there will a folder section for TV Tropes, lampshading how this very wiki uses the trope explained on the page in some fashion. Very meta. Even more meta is the logo, though it could just be drunk.
- Murphy's laws.
- "I don't mean to complain" is something you say right before you complain.
- "I don't mean to brag" is something you say right before you brag.
- In summary the apophasis
is a rhetorical lampshade hanging.
- In summary the apophasis
- Any point at which TV Tropes indicates the presence of Lampshade Hanging, including this entry itself, and any consequent lampshading of this example that may exist.
- Every Self-Demonstrating Article, which this is and currently lampshades.
- Every TV Tropes article demonstrates the existence of some literary device or other aspect of a message or story (or real life); therefore, it stands to reason to say that every moment in which this site makes a statement or other indication of the presence of anything is Lampshade Hanging (although the only things which are to be taken note of are the things it lampshades themselves).
- Any moment in which a person refers to the existence of oneself.
- Any instance in which a person (or anything at all) refers to the existence of anything.
- Anything that has meaning; for example, the thought or statement "I exist" or "this website enumerates literary devices"... so, any articulation, declaration, or indication of anything (meaning that the only thing that makes the Lampshade Hanging described on this website noteworthy is its application inasmuch as calling to attention examples of tropes frequently used in literature).
- Any instance in which a person (or anything at all) refers to the existence of anything.
- Whenever you say, "No pun intended." Especially when the pun was intended.
- Existentialism, sort of.
Specific examples:
- When the Allies invaded Normandy, Adolf Hitler had taken a sleeping pill and was not to be awakened, full stop, meaning critical German reinforcements could not be ordered to the front. A German general mused on how improbable and absurd this would sound to future historians.
- In the English court case of R v Collins, Edmund Davies LJ commented that "This is about as extraordinary a case as my brethren and I have ever heard.... Were [the facts] put into a novel or portrayed on the stage, they would be regarded as being so improbable as to be unworthy of serious consideration and verging at times on farce."
- The Heart Attack Grill of Chandler, AZ. In addition to offering nothing but super-fatty burgers and fries, the owner dresses as a doctor and the waitresses dress as nurses to put the unhealthy nature of his food bluntly.
- China had the notorious "one-child" policy, which stated that parents could only bear one child per family or face a loss of social benefits. This shifted the birthrate towards the male side in China. This was lampshaded in a Chinese textbook published by the state with a discussion question saying "Imagine that in the future, you could only have one child. Would you like a boy or a girl?"
- Which was changed to a two-child policy (starting in 2014, nationwide in 2016) and a three-child policy (in one province in 2016, nationwide in 2021) before being totally scrapped later in 2021.
- RealRadioXS and Jack FM lampshade many, many radio cliches, with the voiceover artist attempting to be Man of a Thousand Voices.
- The Virgin American inflight safety video is filled with lampshades and borders on parody.
- "If you're the 0.00000000001 of you who have never used a seatbelt before..."
- Southwest Airlines also gets cheeky with its inflight briefings
- Before awarding Roy P. Benavidez the Medal of Honor, President Ronald Reagan reportedly told the press "If the story of his heroism were a movie script, you would not believe it."
- A large company published the following statement:If our efforts to protect the security of personal information about our guests and team members are unsuccessful, we could be subject to costly government enforcement actions and private litigation and our reputation could suffer.
The nature of our business involves the receipt and storage of personal information about our guests and team members. We have a program in place to detect and respond to data security incidents. To date, all incidents we have experienced have been insignificant. If we experience a significant data security breach or fail to detect and appropriately respond to a significant data security breach, we could be exposed to government enforcement actions and private litigation. In addition, our guests could lose confidence in our ability to protect their personal information, which could cause them to discontinue usage of REDcards, decline to use our pharmacy services, or stop shopping with us altogether. The loss of confidence from a significant data security breach involving team members could hurt our reputation, cause team member recruiting and retention challenges, increase our labor costs and affect how we operate our business.- The above appeared in the 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-K, filed by Target Corporation. In 2013, Target experienced the worst data breach to happen to any company, exposing personal information on more than 70 million Target customers. More-or-less, almost everything Target predicted happened to the company due to the 2013 "data security incident"
- "radare2", a piece of open sourced reverse engineering software, has a biased comparison web page between itself, IDA Pro and Hopper. The first sentence of said comparison web page?This is a (completely unfair) comparison between radare2, IDA Pro and Hopper.
- A 1970 NFL game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders ended in a tie when the Raiders' then 43-year-old quarterback/placekicker George Blanda made a long field goal.note Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt had this wisecrack regarding Blanda's age:Why, this George Blanda is as good as his father, who used to play for Houston.
- In 1979, a startup golf equipment company, TaylorMade, introduced its first product—a driver with its head made of steel instead of the traditional persimmon wood. The company gave it the name "Pittsburgh Persimmon", playing off the city's steelmaking tradition. The Pittsburgh Persimmon, though not the first metal wood, proved the first successful example of such, and by the 1990s metals (first steel, later aluminum alloys and titanium) had completely displaced wood as the standard for club heads of that type.
