The Interactional Phenomenon of Cringe and Irony
The Intention of this Article
Instead of attempting to find an action which causes unnatural discomfort in a social environment, I found it more interesting to approach the problem in reverse: to first determine the very discomfort I am trying to elicit. Is the concept itself abstract and indescribable, or is there a context in which this discomfort is recognized by the very society it is meant to disrupt? Does it lose its impact as a ‘glitch’ in society as soon as it becomes recognized? Is its recognition beneficial or detrimental to society? I will be discussing one of the many forms of discomfort we feel, and a factor which complicates how social interactions are interpreted.
What is Cringe and Why is it Niche
The word ‘cringe’, has evolved from its former state whereby it was synonymous with the act of flinching or recoiling in reaction to many forms of distaste, to a reaction to more specific social conditions. In the modern age, the word is more commonly used, when, perhaps, one finds themselves self-reflecting and faced with a rueful action in their past. Essentially, it is a combination of regret, awkwardness and embarrassment concerning an event that does not warrant an emotion as strong as remorse, but still constitutes as failure — almost uniquely in a social setting — in the eyes of the arbiter.
Cringe is often tinged with humor and schadenfreude so long as it is happening to someone else, which brings up the most interesting point about it; it is possible to feel cringe on behalf of someone else. There is a subtle but important distinction between the natures of feeling happy for someone, feeling angry at someone, feeling gratuitous to someone, and the former. The latter three are relatively simply concepts in comparison to the implications contained within the idea of feeling embarrassed in witnessing one’s own or someone else’s failure. In essence, merely laying witness to a failure in performing socially to an adequate standard is enough to elicit this emotion, a standard of social interaction that has been ingrained into us by none other than society itself.
Experiencing Cringe
In case there are readers who are blissfully unfamiliar with the concept, I will provide you with an example
Why does this make us react the way we do? While we may not react the exact same way, the combination of embarrassment, contempt, disgust yet almost sympathetic amusement is unmistakeable. The sympathy, however, is diminished by the fact that he is presumably attempting to smugly demean someone else in the process of trying (and failing) to hide is own (assumed) insecurities concerning being single.
Another example
The context in which this occurs is that a local resident, named Bill Murray, has died at the same time as death hoax of celebrity Billy Murray has been spreading around, resulting in the overzealous correction made in the above picture (Fig. 2). While we definitely feel more sympathy for the person who makes the correction due to it being an honest mistake — compared to the former which is more pitiably malicious — at the same time theres an underlying voice that says ‘well he shouldn’t have made such a stupid mistake’. To me, it almost seems like that society has ingrained in us that failure is simply not acceptable, so we cringe and flinch at at every instance we witness it.
In this article by Valeriya Safronova: On Fake Instagram, a Chance to be Real, she talks about the conditions under which self-depiction needs to be devoid of flaws, and failures need to be kept in private. Likewise, albeit outdated, Alice E. Marwick’s Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy makes an attempt at understanding the shallow quid pro quo, pitiful attention seeking nature of Instagram micro-celebrity culture, but fails to portray the hierarchical nature of the world. While the latter article deals with the “successful” microcelebrities, it does not acknowledge the hundreds and thousands of people who have been filtered out by the Instagram system, those who are still desperately hashtagging #likeforalike and #followforfollow to no avail. The system removes those who are not successful from our view, which is not something I condemn, but something that must be understood.
Modern Schadenfreude
While failure is being erased from our scope, it is being viewed as entertainment for others. Watching others fail, fueled by a generally non-malicious schadenfreude or perhaps emotional masochism, has become immensely popular. A variety of pages and forums such as The Cringe Channel or r/cringepics or r/CringeAnarchy or channels such as FailArmy are immensely popular and dedicated to providing the most up to date cringe and fails, amassing millions of followers. While FailArmy is someone irrelevant to our discussion because I am preoccupied with failures in social interaction, this indulgence we have in other people’s failures is social commentary in and of itself.
Perhaps, almost counterintuitively, this fascination with breached social standards is just another manifestation of our desire for neoliberal self-empowerment, where our desire to feel superior by defining strangers by their one instance of failure, or simple demand for schadenfreudig entertainment, is provided for by the free market. At the same time however, this entire concept of cringe and structured social standards would appear to be very anti-political correctness. Instead of promoting a progressive mindset, it rejects anything that does not conform to societal standards. A graduate from the University of Michigan, Maximillian Alvarez, would in fact suggest that “neoliberalism feeds political correctness”, under the notion that neoliberalism forces necessary government institutions such as schools to treat their students as ‘customers’, whereby it impedes the institutions’ ability to perform their functions effectively. If that were the case, then it would suggest that this schadenfreude, in dismissing political correctness, is also detrimental to neoliberalism.
It is almost impossible to make a blanket statement as to how this morbid fascination concerning individual social failure contributes to the peoples’ success as a whole: on one hand, the freedom of expression allows the failing moments in society to be documented and fixed by the people, empowering them. At the same time, however, empowered individuals tends to draw emphasis away from governing laws, thereby the ‘fix’ of those who are at this time considered societal failures consists of broadening the societal standards in which they occur, diminishing the very structure that allows this empowerment to operate.
The Role of Irony
Perhaps you have heard of Irony’s malicious subset; sarcasm, described by Oscar Wilde as the “lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence”. Irony and sarcasm both require quite an in depth understanding of the language and culture it is being used in, but whereas sarcasm is used exclusively maliciously (however lightly) and is not advanced in its use, irony extends to a far greater range of implementations, and, in my opinion, requires a much greater understanding of the social setting you are in and people you are with to operate effectively.
The interesting point about this, and the reason why this is related is thus: the difference between the act of doing something, and doing something ironically, is almost indistinguishable. In fact, in most cases, the more indistinguishable, the better the irony. As a result, several terms have emerged to describe the confusion that inevitably happens, such as Poe’s Law and post-irony. When irony is taken into account, the neoliberal mechanism that interprets failing patches in society becomes much more complex, because it allows for more contextually subjective variables in society to be taken into account instead of a conflicting trifecta of neoliberal empowerment, implicit social standards and tolerance to the breaching of said standards.
Ironically Cringe
Finally, we arrive at the point where my self becomes relevant to this analysis. While irony is by no means a new means of being humorous, combining cringe and irony is still a relatively new phenomenon, that differs from mockery in its subtlety. To explicate, I am describing the humor that can be derived from intentionally failing to perform the role of a normal social interactor. Being ironically cringe is perhaps one of my favorite types of humor, but at the same time it is nearly impossible to perform for a stranger without it being misconstrued as unironic.
For example, there are a group of people on the internet who self label as incels, short for involuntary celibates. They are a very toxic group of people (generally men) who hate women because they cannot get a partner. They refer to the “alpha” males who can get partners as “Chads” — a generic name for what is meant to be the typical gymrat douchebag — that all the (stupid, blond) “Stacies” (women) fall in love with. It is the most self-loathing and downright frightening community to peer into, never-mind to imagine being a part of. That being said, there is a great deal of crude humor to be found in ironically imitating these people as an act of reference when interacting with other people who are also aware of these incels.
The very existence of the memes is social commentary on the stigma of masculinity and validation in spite of itself. The fact is that to be able to execute irony, one needs to understand what is expected in a social setting, and subvert that. In other words, to ironically fail a social interaction humorously, one needs to understand what would constitute success, and exaggerate the failure so that it can be acknowledged as irony. In being aware of that, I would almost never attempt this niche type of humor with strangers as an icebreaker, and pretty much reserve it for only the closest of friends. If anything, it is interesting that the interpretation of virtually identical actions exists almost only as polar opposites, and differ only due to the context in which they occur; the action may be less important than the environment in which they are performed.
Post-Irony
While irony can indeed offset the negativity of a negative action, it is only to an extent. The aforementioned fact that doing something ironically and doing something earnestly are nearly indistinguishable, means that in essence, what you are doing ironically is almost no different to doing it without being ironic. For example, if I were to imitate perfectly a self-taken video such as this one:
If my imitation was truly performed to the point of being indistinguishably ironic, the fact of the matter is that anyone who sees the video just sees me sweet-talking a camera with bad comforting lines. While actually doing that was within my consideration at first, the very thought of even pretending to be that cringe made me cringe inside, which illustrates the fact that irony is not an all protective shield. That being said, I have an example that much better illustrates this idea than my imitation ever could.
Most would agree that there was a degree of irony to which the actions above took place; that he is portraying an exaggerated reaction to which a Rick and Morty fan would have upon being told that the sauce they wanted was no longer available. That being said however, I find that whether or not this was done ironically makes almost no difference to how much it makes me cringe. At the end of the day, that man still jumped on the counter of McDonalds, yelled out the catchphrase from a show associated with egoistic fanatics and rolled around on the floor in a tantrum.
To Conclude
I hope I have accurately illustrated the point I intended to make: that due to the complexity of social implications and our capacity for thought, the feeling of discomfort, to me, is more of a novelty worth analyzing than than the actions that lead up to it. In realizing how niche and group-specific humor has the potential to become, I also realized how the capacity to feel second hand emotions as well as the capacity for irony complicates the perception of social glitches and discomfort. Ultimately, our performance and subversion of social interaction is moulded by and dependent on the community we live in, thus I found it more valuable to observe the finer implications of something I frequently partake in that other people may see as socially disruptive, rather than intentionally seeking to create an unnatural stir in an effort to test the boundaries of our world and conditioning.
