Band 13, Heft 1 - Special Issue: The Multimodality of Cringe Comedy in Screen and Digital Media Productions; Guest Editors: Nashwa Elyamany and Deena Shazly Elshazly

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’.

For almost a century, several Egyptian comedies have set up cringe-worthy power-sensitive encounters between struggling low-paid teachers and spoiled rich and powerful students, often leading to negative portrayals of teachers and student-teacher relationship. One play, Madraset el-Moshaghbeen ‘School of the Rowdies’ (1971), has long been held accountable for student misconduct across the country. A 2008 film with a loosely similar theme, RamaDan Mabrouk Abul-Alamein Hamouda, has received a much warmer welcome as a harmless light comedy. This paper brings these two comedies into focus and probes into the management of cringe in filmic text based on the Benign-Violation Theory of humor as well as Baldry and Thibault’s (2006. Multimodal transcription and text analysis: A multimedia toolkit and coursebook with associated on-line course. Equinox ) Multimodal Transcription Model. Optimizing for the four dimensions of psychological distance (temporal, social, spatial, and hypothetical) would help control the benignity of embarrassing violations and free the audience to enjoy the humor. Alternatively, minimizing psychological distance would evoke audience empathy with the violated teacher character and may block audience amusement. Audience reactions through the comment field on strategic clips from the film and play on YouTube would reveal whether a cringe-inducing scene has evoked amusement, vicarious embarrassment, or both. The paper proposes an inventory of the features that would contribute to adjusting psychological distance to achieve the desired effect. These features intersect with the four dimensions of psychological distance, narrative and stylistic choices, as well as the multimodal affordances of filmic and embodied expressions.

Cringe comedy, wittily disseminating truth through the interplay between the verbal and contextual, centralizes vicarious/embarrassment as its endpoint through levels of para/linguistic incongruity and social superiority. This paper focuses on the stand-up comedian presentation along with paratextual elements that document the sociopolitical situation in two different cultures contributing to the process of perception on the part of the gazing audience. The paper questions the spectatorial gaze through post-millennial media practices that pertain to the visual among other visceral affects thus diminishing the role of the active witness whose role is beyond watching. The act of witnessing, globally foregrounded and requested by the turn of the twenty-first century, is investigated within the structure of stand-up comedy to figure out whether or not the spectator is an active witness or a by-stander. For this purpose, the study applies Andy Lavender’s model of performance modalities to stand-up comedy performances by the American Ali Wong and the Egyptian Ali Quandil; Don Wong and Mawdoa Hareemi Shweya ( Some Feminine Stuff ) in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Lavender’s model proposes that four modalities (the emotional, physical, discursive, contextual) turn the actor/performer into the physical medium of communication to the audience.

The aim of this research is to investigate how Egyptian podcast Kefaya Ba2a (That is Enough!) is a good instance of cringe comedy that aims at critising and commenting on social issues in a sarcastic manner. This research presents an interpretive reading of the podcast as a cultural practice that leads to creating a discourse (or narrative) that provides different/alternative knowledge breaking social norms. The meanings and themes delivered through the podcast’s narratives manage to create a communication code that is shared and negotiated by the Kefaya Ba2a digi-communitas on the podcast’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/kefayaba2a). The analytical framework of this research is based on the frame that both Kress and Van Leeuwen propose through their theory of multimodal communication (Kress, Gunther & Theo Van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication . Arnold Publishers). The theory suggests a four-strata-frame that focuses on different multimodal resources that contribute to meaning-making. This research investigates the different semiotic resources that all combine to create the discourse of Kefaya Ba2a which takes humour as its major tool to deliver certain messages. It also explores the effect of Kefaya Ba2a ’s discourse on its audience who have the chance to respond to it on the podcast’s Facebook page. Different response patterns are demonstrated to show how Kefaya Ba2a ’s discourse turns to into a user-generated content that opens the opportunity for new readings of the original discourse. In this regard, multimodality is investigated to show how audience communicates with the themes and topics the podcast tackles using multimodal resources to generate their readings.

After the January 2011 revolution, Egyptian artists had the opportunity to express their ideas more openly. One of the major productions that started in 2011 in Egypt was TokTok , a comic magazine for adults. During the period of 2011–2015, TokTok issued fifteen issues that incorporated a collection of comics and comic strips created by different Egyptian artists. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether cringe humor has been an integral part of the drawings and stories presented in TokTok and how this type of humor reflected the socio-cultural and political scene in Egypt during that period. For this paper, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design . Routledge) model of multimodal analysis was applied to selected comics from the fifteen issues of TokTok to investigate possible elements of cringe humor as depicted in this Egyptian graphic magazine. Major results show that elements of cringe humor are not evident in all analyzed comics.