One of the more wearisome terms of contemporary cultural commentary is "cringe," and especially its usage to denote a subgenre of comedy that centers on the audience's "cringe" reaction toward a character's embarrassing themselves in some manner--with Michael Scott in the American version of The Office, and the reactions he induces in viewers, notorious as exemplifying this.
Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."
It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.
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