Cringe comedy extends Linda Williams’s body genres to banality rather than explicitness.
Evidence
The surfer’s crouching posture describes another aspect of surge aesthetics: the prominence of “cringe.” In an influential work on cinema, Linda Williams identified “body genres” as thematic and formal projects to produce off screen for audiences an experience of what was depicted on screen for characters. Her archetypes are melodrama, pornography, and horror, and the corresponding experiences are emotional pique, sexual arousal, and fear. We can extend Williams’s analysis by remarking cringe as a movement of inward shrinking and gutting discomfort, a bowel-seizing correlative to colonoscopy camera-work. Activated by banality and awkwardness rather than the explicitness of conventional body genres, cringe shows riposte the cerebralism of prestige dramas like The Good Wife or Billions with comedic charisma authorized by close proximity between the protagonist and the actor/creator (Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Louis C. K.’s Louie, Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, Lena Dunham’s Girls, Issa Rae’s Insecure, and Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi). Just as the characters are trapped in boring, meaningless, slightly precarious jobs and rote or degrading relationships, anxious and frustrated, the spectator is made similarly uneasy, in unremediable cortisol elevation. Even when surges verge on disequilibrating the passive consumption of the stream, the show’s selfsame affects flood the spectator, immersive imperative undammed. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 240
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines ‘cringe’ as a body genre of inward shrinking and gutting discomfort triggered by banality, distinct from Williams’s melodrama/pornography/horror.
- XREF: Extends Linda Williams’s body-genre theory from film studies; connects to the reader’s broader project of naming immediacy’s aesthetic features.