Introduction: the multimodality of cringe comedy in screen and digital media productions

Abstract

The millennial moment reflects an occupation with truth aiming for clear interpretations of the surrounding reality. Owing to the political conditions at the turn of the twenty-first century, both media and literary forms showed considerable interest in documentation. As inspections of truth yield no precise results, documentation shape-shifted into self-reflective presentations of social and personal failings. According to Patrick (Wöhrle, Patrick. 2021. Two shades of cringe: Problems in attributing painful laughter. Humanities 10(3). 99. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h10030099.), media has developed patterns of presentations that irritate rather than settle the viewers’ down thus destabilizing the conventional sender–message–recipient format. Interestingly, literary treatments have shown similar tendencies towards more integration of the spectator. Engagement with social or political conditions stems originally from a gap between what we know and what we see which engenders humour at many occasions based on superiority or incongruity. In post-millennial times especially with the Covid-19 outbreak, feeling strange, awkward or embarrassed are feelings of the mundane. Here, cringe comedy is a forerunner. Cringe humour holds deep sense of incongruity once attending to the ambivalence the term carries. Humour, which is supposedly a tool of both pleasure and relief, becomes rather a trigger of some painful visceral affect that ‘cringes’.