This is a very lightly edited transcription of a presentation I recently gave at the Popular Culture Association Conference, April 8–11, 2026, in the Humor and Comedy area.
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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