hal-05634055 “Extremely Painful to Endure. Good work” : The Pragmatics of Cringe Humor (…)

Parallel to the emergence of “cringe comedy” on television in the early 2000s, the internet and social media have witnessed amultiplication of content labeled as “cringe” or “cringeworthy”. The #cringe hashtag has become a familiar tag and there are nowmultiple accounts and pages dedicated to the curation of cringeworthy content, some of which are very popular. This widespreadattention has elevated “cringe”—a term which fundamentally describes the feeling of being “very embarrassed and uncomfortableabout something” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “disgusted” (Collins Dictionary), to the extent of “recoil[ing] in distaste” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)—into an established category of entertainment online. In this context, “cringe” now refers to a genre of contentthat aims to provoke a paradoxical feeling of simultaneous amusement and embarrassment, which rightfully belongs to what is nowknown as “cringe humor”. This study examines viewers’ reception of cringe content in a corpus of 1061 comments posted on acringe compilation video posted on YouTube in 2022. The main research question addressed in this study is: Do viewers align withthe affective stance—simultaneous amusement and embarrassment—expected in response to a video explicitly tagged as #cringeand described as “meant for entertainment purposes”? To address this question, the study conducts a quantitative and qualitativeanalysis of user comments, focusing on two key aspects: expression of discomfort and expression of amusement. In exploring users’reception of cringe humor, the study additionally documents both the ways users “cringe” online and the specific triggers that elicitthis reaction.