The character of Abed, played by the marvelous Danny Pudi, is himself a guru of genre, a child of television always conscious of the ways in which life—or at least life at Greendale—imitates TV. As Community has matured, it has embraced its own self-awareness, transforming the stale tropes of mediocre movies and TV shows into comic gold. In part, this is due to the justly lauded paintball episode, which was many fans' first introduction to the series, and which gave show creator Dan Harmon the impetus to attempt to repeat the feat. But it is also because Community wisely taps into the spirit of a moment when all genres feel equally tapped out, and equally worthy of mockery.

Community may be its foremost practitioner, but this self-aware mockery has become a staple of contemporary comedy, both on television and in film. One of the most underrated movies of the past few years was the Judd Apatow-produced Pineapple Express (2008), in which two layabout stoners, played by James Franco and Seth Rogen, accidentally stumble into the plot of a particularly brainless machine-gun-toting action-film inferno. The film has its cake and eats it too, enjoying the rat-a-tat of automatic weaponry while also standing above the fray, mocking the tradition it so lavishly celebrates.

Pineapple followed in the footsteps of the 2004 British film Shaun of the Dead, a horror-film pastiche which had paid loving tribute to the works of George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) while reserving the right to mock the excesses of zombiedom. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the team behind Shaun (Wright had directed, Pegg had written and starred), went on to tackle another genre deserving of similarly fond scorn, burlesquing the buddy action comedies of the 1980s with the ingenious Hot Fuzz (2007).

A new generation of filmmakers raised on the mediocre genre exercises of the 1980s may have begun the trend, but it is television that has truly embraced genre-savviness as a creative trope, with the steadily improving HBO series Bored to Death and Eastbound & Down both devoted to subtly undercutting the genres to which they have pledged mock-fealty. Bored to Death is a noir-flecked mystery whose often-ludicrous cases, and chief detective, stifled novelist Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman), bespeak the show's jaundiced view of the hard-boiled mode. And Eastbound & Down, detailing the half-hearted attempts of washed-up fireballer Kenny Powers to return to the major leagues, while harder to peg stylistically, often reaches for a mock-heroic tone ("Welcome to the resistance," Kenny greets friend and lackey Stevie on his arrival in Mexico) not at all in keeping with its perpetual air of self-inflicted foolishness. The soundtrack is Sergio Leone, but the action evokes Will Ferrell, not Clint Eastwood.