Tongue-in-cheek

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The term tongue-in-cheek refers to a style of humour in which things are said only half seriously, or in a subtly mocking way. To say something in a tongue-in-cheek way is to speak with irony.

The term first appeared in print in the book The Ingoldsby Legends by Richard Harris Barham, published in 1845. The author uses the term describing a Frenchman:

He fell to admiring his friend's English watch.

He examined the face,

And the back of the case,

And the young Lady's portrait there, done on enamel, he

Saw by the likeness was one of the family;

Cried 'Superbe! Magnifique!' (With his tongue in his cheek)

Then he open'd the case, just to take a peep in it, and

Seized the occasion to pop back the minute hand.

Tongue-in-cheek humour in fiction often takes the form of gentle parodies, in stories that use the conventions of an established serious genre while gently poking fun at some aspects of that genre. A tongue-in-cheek work still relies on these conventions and is not the same as a farce. Good examples of films that are made in a tongue-in-cheek way are An American Werewolf in London, Scream, or True Lies. Note that these films are still faithful to their genre (horror and spy, respectively) and are not out-and-out parodies such as Airplane!.

References

• Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, by William and Mary Morris, HarperCollins, 1988, ISBN 006015862X
• The Ingoldsby Legends by The Rev. Richard H. Barham [1]