Squirm Responsibly: How Cringe Comedy Became America's Favorite Emotional Workout

There's a very specific sound a room makes when someone watches Michael Scott bite into a whole raw onion at a dinner party while his boss watches. It's not laughter. Not yet. It's a long, strangled nnnnngh — the noise of a human being physically bracing for impact. And then, a beat later, the laugh breaks loose like a sneeze.

That two-stage reaction — dread, then release — is the engine of modern American comedy. Somewhere along the way, we stopped wanting our jokes to be clever and started wanting them to hurt a little. Cringe comedy isn't a niche anymore. It's the water we swim in.

The Slow Rise of the Squirm

It's tempting to blame The Office, and sure, the 2005 US adaptation deserves some of it. But the roots go deeper. Ricky Gervais was mining the same vein in Britain two years earlier, and Curb Your Enthusiasm was weaponizing Larry David's social obliviousness before either of them. What changed wasn't the comedy — it was us.

The 2010s turned social humiliation into a spectator sport. Smartphones put a camera in every pocket, and suddenly the nightmare scenario of cringe comedy — being caught on tape at your worst — became the default condition of being alive. Every viral video is a cringe bit that someone's real life had to pay for. We watch strangers get dunked on for wearing the wrong thing to Coachella, and then we come home and watch Nathan Fielder instruct a struggling small business owner to do something catastrophically ill-advised, and we laugh at both. The line between watching comedy and watching surveillance footage got blurry.

That's the uncomfortable truth underneath the genre: cringe comedy is funny because we know exactly what it feels like when everyone sees you fail.

Your Brain on Secondhand Shame

Psychologists have a term for the wince — vicarious embarrassment — and it turns out to be one of the most reliable feelings humans have. Studies on empathy have found that even people who score low on empathy tests still flinch when watching someone else's social blunder. The squirm is nearly universal.

Which raises the obvious question: why would we seek that out recreationally?

The answer, I think, is that cringe comedy is a controlled burn. Watching Steve Carell tank a roast is like getting a smallpox vaccine made of shame. You experience the exact physiological signature of social death — the heat in your face, the urge to flee — from the safety of your couch, with no actual social cost. It's exposure therapy with a laugh track. You're rehearsing the disaster so that if disaster ever visits you, you've already survived it once.

There's also a status transaction happening. When you laugh at Michael Scott, part of what you're feeling is sweet, shameful relief: at least that's not me. Cringe comedy flatters the viewer. We're the competent ones. We would never order ourselves a full second entrée at a business lunch. Right?

I Think You Should Leave and the Art of the Escalation

If The Office built the house of cringe, I Think You Should Leave is what happens when you let a raccoon renovate it. Tim Robinson's sketches work on a different principle than mockumentary awkwardness. There's no camera crew, no knowing looks to the audience. Just a man, in a hot dog car, insisting he doesn't even want it anymore.

The genius of ITYSL is that it's not really about social awkwardness at all — it's about the moment after the mistake, when the only thing worse than admitting you're wrong is doubling down. Robinson's characters have all committed some small, forgivable error, and they'd rather burn down the entire social contract than confess. It's cringe comedy as a study in pride, and it's devastating because every one of us has been that guy at least once, holding a broken door handle and a lie.

That's the pivot point of the whole genre: the best cringe isn't laughing at weirdos. It's recognizing yourself in them and laughing to keep from crying.

So Is It Empathy Training?

Here's the optimistic read, and I've come around to it. Cringe comedy, done well, is one of the few genres that forces you to sit with a flawed person instead of judging them from a distance. You can't click away from Michael Scott. You have to stay in the scene, feel his loneliness under the bluster, and eventually understand why he bought everyone Dunder Mifflin mugs.

Compare that to the dominant mode of internet-era comedy, which is mockery — the quote-tweet, the ratio, the duet where you get to be the smart one. Cringe comedy asks something harder. It says: this person is embarrassing, and you love them anyway. Sit with it.

Whether it actually makes us more empathetic is the kind of thing you'd need a longitudinal study to prove. But anecdotally? The shows that taught a generation how to hold two feelings at once — contempt and affection for the same ridiculous human — are all cringe shows. That's not nothing.

Watch It Again, Wince Again

The final twist is that cringe comedy ages differently than other genres. A joke about politics dates itself in four years. But social failure is eternal. Your grandchildren will still understand why the dinner party where Michael Scott faked a choking death is unfunny and unwatchable and absolutely must be seen again.

So keep wincing. Keep pressing play on people's worst days. Just remember, next time you feel that heat rising in your face during a sketch, that the discomfort isn't a side effect. It's the whole point. You're not watching someone fail socially.

You're taking a class in how to be one.