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.

___

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

___

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).

So my contention is that metamodern artworks utilize aesthetic strategies to protect against the postmodern tendency to laugh away or contextualize away interiority and earnest expressions of it. And to protect against modernist tendencies to treat narratives primarily as symbolic of larger concerns or to reduce narrative experience to scientific or psychological phenomena.

What are metamodernism’s aesthetic strategies?

In my book, I locate the oscillation between modern and postmodern sensibilities that Vermeulen and van den Akker identified as just one of eleven metamodern aesthetic methods I propose.

1. Empathic Reflexivity (Including Ceriello’s Life-as-Movie)
2. The Narrative Double Frame (Eshelman’s Performatism)
3. Oscillation Between Modern and Postmodern Dualities
4. Quirky
5. The Tiny (Metamodern Minimalism)
6. The Epic (Metamodern Maximalism)
7. Constructive Pastiche
8. Ironesty
9. Normcore
10. Over-projection (Anthropomorphizing)
11. Meta-cute

I don’t have time today to give all of these methods their proper consideration, but I wanted to at least mention them. (Though you can read more about them here.) As it turns out, it will work for me to largely stick with oscillation in my discussions of metamodern cringe television and The Chair Company.

Metamodern television comedy

Given that the main focus of my talk is a television comedy, I’ll give a few examples from that area that I think exemplify metamodernism. Each of these shows has elements that might, at first look, lead one to understand them through the lens of postmodernism, and yet in each case an important part of the vibe will be missing from such an analysis.

Community overflows with postmodern intertextual popular culture references, but for the autistic character Abed, the intertextuality goes beyond postmodern winking and nodding, and instead serves as a way in to the richness of human connection that might otherwise elude him.

Shameless humorously depicts a family who—especially in the case of the patriarch Frank—do not subscribe to normative ethics and morality. But rather than being simply a postmodern goof that disrupts cliched morality tropes, the show uses their inversion in order to ask the question: What can we observe, sympathetically, about human interiority when our normal expectations of what it is to be human are stripped away?

Bojack Horseman, an adult animated cartoon set in a version of Hollywood in which about half of the characters are of regular human form and half are anthropomorphized animals, traffics in both the intertextual games of Community and the anti-hero character studies of Shameless, while (especially as the series develops) offering deep, poignant explorations of issues like addiction, platonic love, family toxicity and the attempt to heal from it, and death.

Those are just a few examples of the metamodern sensibility in post-millennium television. In my book Say Hello to Metamodernism!, I provide a tour of sorts through the landscape of metamodern television as well as film, music, and literary fiction with many more exemplars.

So that’s an extremely brief introduction to metamodernism.

As for cringe

I lack the time to offer a lot of commentary on ways of defining cringe, but will just share a few useful observations from other thinkers who have engaged with cringe in a scholarly way.

… Cringe is unusual in that it is prompted not by a conventional object but by our perception of another person’s feelings toward that object. Affect itself becomes cringe’s object. Cringing turns on the lights, however briefly or intensely, to reveal the socialized machinery controlling not what we feel, per se, but the structures of feeling that condition what we have come to regard as appropriate feeling or even natural feeling.

—J. Logan Smilges, “Cringe Theory,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Issue 13.1 (Spring 2024).

[Cringe can be understood as] intrusions of the real in unexpected and unmanageable forms.

—Jason Middleton, Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 2014), 19.

I find that cringing arises in connection with a sense of “representedness”: I am no longer in the situation; now I represent it to myself as a story, something that happened in the past—and then I react. The cringing reaction, as I see it, is an act of misprision, of imperfect, transgressive identification: first I laugh at the fool—and then, in a stunning moment of recognition, I realize that I am the fool.

—Marina Ludwigs, “Cringing and Other Desacralizing Affects in Post-Millennial Aesthetics,” Anthropoetics: the Journal of Generative Anthropology. XXIV, no. 1 Fall 2018.

My own attempt at a definition

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

That is how I would explain cringe generally. In looking at The Chair Company, I’ll arrive at a specifically metamodern iteration of cringe. So let’s look more closely at The Chair Company now.

The Chair Company

One could say that The Chair Company’s metamodern cringe sensibility is—just to start with—encapsulated even in the title itself. It’s a title that sounds outrageously—and yes, cringingly—tedious, and yet the very tedious opacity of the title leads a certain kind of viewer to be intrigued: What could a show with such a title possibly be about? How could it sustain interest across an entire episode, let alone an entire season? Unless one is already a fan of the show’s creator and star Tim Robinson, one gives the first episode a chance both in spite of and because of the boringness of the title.

Without overly spoiling the plot that unfolds across the show’s eight episodes, I can tell you this: Tim Robinson’s character Ron Trosper is a mid-level manager at a property development firm called Fisher Robay. In the first episode, at an important presentation, he is embarrassed when his chair falls apart underneath him. Throughout the remainder of the series, he is obsessed with investigating “the chair company” that created the faulty product that led to his humiliation. Woven around this through-line are stories that allow us to know his family, co-workers, and various shady but ultimately relatable characters that emerge during his investigation.

As Sarah Moran at Screen Rant has written about The Chair Company, it is “a supremely weird, yet surprisingly heartwarming story” with a main character who is “…awkward, a little sad, and potentially dangerous when pushed too far.” [But] “… we do wind up rooting for him.” And, in the words of Ben Tavers, at Indiewire: “Sometimes we’re nervously laughing at Ron, because he’s done something beyond the pale. But just as frequently we’re giddily laughing with Ron, because his befuddled indignation is so identifiable.” Neither of these reviewers utilizes the term “metamodernism,” but the way they describe the show evokes the concept.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Why do we laugh? With Shazia Mirza

The opening scene of episode one establishes the show’s cringe bona fides—in this case, Ron falls much closer to the mortifying end of a spectrum that has relatable at the other end.

At a family dinner out that is meant to be a celebration of Ron’s promotion at work, he manages to find a way to become THAT embarrassing dad. After Ron’s teenage son tells a waitress that Ron has been put in charge of the construction of a new mall, and she casually drops that she has not been to a mall “since I was like fourteen,” Ron enters a spiral of socially inappropriate defensiveness. He seems to view the waitress’s observation as a personal insult, and argues with her that she almost certainly has been in a mall. He is unable to let it go, and things become tense and awkward.

The family reacts with affects that imply a combination of unconditional support for Ron and an exhausted resignation. Their response helps me, as a viewer, feel some sympathy for Ron, but in this scene, I find myself identifying primarily with Ron’s wife, son and daughter in their embarrassment. It’s conventional cringe.

However, later in the same episode, we get our first dose of what I would label “metamodern cringe.” Here, Ron is at his computer working on a slideshow for his daughter’s upcoming wedding rehearsal dinner and seeking music to accompany the images. We see him type “Emotional Wedding Song” into the YouTube search bar, and the top result is Jim Croce’s “I’ve Got a Name.”

Ron clicks on that option, and his eyes moisten as he hears the nostalgic music paired with photos of his children at various younger ages. It’s a genuinely touching moment for the viewers as well as for Ron.

With the camera switching between the visual slideshow, Ron’s face and the YouTube page, we see Ron respond to another user’s comment:

I remember listening to this song when I was a kid in the back of my mom’s car—life goes by so fucking fast.

with a comment of his own:

It really does go by so fucking fast. You think you’re gonna do something with your life and the next thing you know it’s too late.

It’s such a “Ron” thing to write. It starts off seeming to be about the relatable bitter-sweetness of watching his children grow up and then takes a bleakly self-focused turn. Not only has he rained on the previous commenter’s sentiment, but in a cringey way he has kind of betrayed his own special moment—at least for a moment.

Re-immersing himself in photos of his family, Ron’s tears begin to really flow, right along with the heart-tugging swell of the Jim Croce song. A viewer of this scene can really feel alongside Ron. But still we don’t know if he’s crying because his heart is bursting with fatherly love or with self-pity. Meanwhile, regardless of how we interpret Ron’s crying, the whole scene is quietly hilarious—just to witness up close a television show character doing the kinds of things we all do in our private moments with our screens. And somehow that it’s Ron—that lovable, cringey dork—doing those things makes it all quietly funnier.

The scene ends when the sequence of family photos Ron has been looking at somehow stumbles into several current-day work-related photos.

One of these photos has a CHAIR in the background. With his tears drying on his cheeks, we see on Ron’s face the focus of a man with a mission. He zooms in on the back of the chair and grabs a clue—the address of the Chair Company.

The rapid cycling in this scene is an example of what I call metamodern cringe humor. We alternate between cringing AT Ron, sometimes cringing WITH him, and sometimes earnestly relating to the feelings expressed on his face.

Tim Robinson in fact is arguably a master at evoking this dynamic with wordless acting. I’m now going to show a clip from episode seven—the penultimate episode of the season—that really shows it off.

Here, Ron and his wife are at a gala at which she has been honored. Ron has a lot on his mind. Some important details in his chair company mystery have been revealed, but, at the same time, he’s had to accept that his opponents may have backed him into a corner. He’s coming to terms with the possible reality that his wife is more accomplished than he will ever be. He has also just learned from an unwitting third party that his wife knows about his crazy mission, which he had been keeping secret from her. And yet she seems to be proud of him.

We see Ron witness and react to his own emotions in the mirror. He is in his wife’s arms but perhaps more with his own reflection. As a viewer, we can speculate on the different feelings Ron is cycling through, but we also may be cycling through our own reactions to Ron’s affect. Sympathizing with Ron for the emotional jumble he’s experiencing. Judging him for the transparency of his self-absorption. Moved by his tears, cringe-laughing at the goofiness of his facial expressions. Moved by the way the soundtrack music pairs with all of this. Aware that we, as viewers, are being manipulated. Moved anyway. Moved anyway.

Postmodern cringe vs. metamodern cringe

In conventional, postmodern cringe—television shows such as Arrested Development or The Office—we bond with other cringers over our shared cringing reaction, with the target being sort of the victim of a ritual sacrifice that enacts that bonding. We are let off the hook for judging and cringing at others, because everybody does it.

In metamodern cringe, as exemplified by The Chair Company, we bond with everybody equally: the character who is the cringe object and the characters who are doing the cringing. In this kind of cringe humor, everybody is let off the hook for everything—both judging cringe and being cringe.