Cringe has become a core part of comedy. We laugh at someone else's embarrassment, and it helps us feel better about ourselves. While comedy’s postmodern turn kept audiences safely detached because we were always in on the joke. But, as we search for human connection in the modern world, Greg Dember, author of Say Hello to Metamodernism, argues that contemporary comedy has quietly overturned this structure. Cringe is no longer the thing that separates us from the fool on the screen. It has become the thing that connects us to them and to each other.

During the last decade or so, “cringe” has become a frequently evoked category, both in self-reflective popular parlance and in the scholarship of comedy. Of course, drawing attention to human imperfection or embarrassment is not a new development in popular culture.

This morning, however, I will suggest that what distinguishes contemporary cringe is its evocation of the metamodern sensibility. Cringe no longer serves only to have audiences laugh at the expense of targeted subjects but to have audiences laugh with sympathetic subjects. Cringe thus has become (in many cases) an affect that validates individual interiority, for the characters in comedic works and thereby for the viewers of these works.

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Cringe is not just embarrassment, but the social agreement that a given situation requires embarrassment.

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I will briefly outline my theorization of metamodernism, a sensibility that has emerged after postmodernism and has been described as involving a return to depth, affect and historicity, often with stylistic or thematic elements that oscillate between modern and postmodern contrasting qualities. Then I will survey the emergence of metamodern cringe in contemporary television comedy, with a focus on the new HBO series The Chair Company.

Metamodernism

By “metamodernism” I’m generally referring to the sensibility that Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker observed in their 2010 article, “Notes on Metamodernism.”

If you’ve already been exposed to discussions of metamodernism, you surely will have seen this quote before, but if you are new to the discourse, it’s a nice formulation to begin from:

Metamodernism . . . oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.

– Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1).

Since this notion of metamodernism was introduced, it has been used to understand a variety of contemporary cultural artifacts that have emerged during or shortly before the new millennium. Scholars and critics of literature, film, television, popular and classical music, visual art, and architecture have applied metamodernism to artworks within their fields.

In my own work on metamodernism, I’ve built on this model by emphasizing two major concepts:

1. A claim about what the underlying motivation may be that draws creators and audiences to the metamodern sensibility.

2. A working list of eleven methods that I have observed creators employing in their metamodern artworks.

What is the motivation underlying the metamodern sensibility?

Metamodernism is a sensibility motivated primarily by a need to safeguard the individual’s interior, subjective felt experience against the potential degradations of postmodern ironic relativism and modernist reductionism.

– Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity, p. 52, (Exact Rush, 2024).