Comedy Night Done Meta?

So I, along with something like 14 million other Americans, love to watch NBC's Thursday Comedy Night. I mean, honestly, this must be one of the best line-ups to grace network TV since...well, long before I was born, probably.

If you are for some reason not familiar with the comedy gold that is Thursday nights on NBC, let me break it down for you:

8pm -- Community starring Joel McHale of The Soup fame as an ex-lawyer caught cheating the system who has to go back to community college and get his degree, teaming up with a ragtag group of misfits along the way.
8:30 -- Perfect Couples. I don't watch this show so it's not really part of this post. I do like Olivia Munn though!
9pm -- The Office. I don't think I need to explain this one. It single-handedly brought back "that's what she said" as a viable joke option, but we can't fault it for that.
9:30 -- Parks and Recreation has finally returned to NBC with Amy Poehler leading an awesome cast made even more awesome with the addition of Rob Lowe (as a dedicated fan of West Wing, I have to say GENIUS) and Adam Scott (who I am currently mildly in love with after his staring role on the short-lived Party Down).
10pm -- 30 Rock. My loyalty to The Office does not quite allow me to say that this is the funniest show ever made, ever. But, um...it is. Tina Fey is everything I hope to be and probably never will because she has a kind of complete and total genius that only manifests itself once in a century. The last person with this much genius was probably Einstein, and he was not even close to being as hot as Tina Fey is.

One thing I've noticed about all these shows is how much self-referencing they all do. NBC apparently likes to order their sitcoms with extra meta-sauce. I mean, you have The Office and Parks and Rec, which are "mockumentary style" with its characters constantly self-referencing and breaking the fourth wall.

Then there's 30 Rock, which is about making a TV show (admittedly a much more lowbrow one than 30 Rock), a premise that is ripe for making meta jokes.

And even Community is not safe, because while the characters don't talk directly to the camera or talk about making shows, there's the character Abed who maybe kinda sorta thinks he lives in a television show (and yet he doesn't seem to realize he does) and is constantly hanging lampshades on everything his cohorts do. They have episodes that parody genres, which include Mafia movies, astronaut movies, and post-apocalyptic movies.

All this to say, meta is in. Meta is so in that probably it is meta to say so.
Ok well time to watch more Community...