The Ringer - Welcome to Cringe Comedy Day2022-08-18T09:46:01-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/230754692022-08-18T09:46:01-04:002022-08-18T09:46:01-04:00When the Creator of ‘Candid Camera’ Pushed Cringe to X-Rated Extremes
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<p>1970’s ‘What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?’ is a time capsule and a precursor to masters like Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen—but it also proves that even cringe comedy has boundaries </p> <p id="5EkkU4"><em>On Friday, Nathan Fielder will bring a close to the first season of his mind-boggling, skin-crawling HBO series, </em>The Rehearsal<em>. No matter </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/7/15/23219384/the-rehearsal-nathan-fielder-review-hbo-nathan-for-you"><em>how you feel about the show</em></a><em>, one thing that can’t be denied is that it’s pushing the boundaries of cringe comedy. So in its honor, </em>The Ringer <em>hereby dubs today </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311428/welcome-to-cringe-comedy-day"><em>Cringe Comedy Day</em></a><em>. Join us—if you can stop clenching your teeth and covering your eyes—as we celebrate and explore everything the niche genre has to offer.</em></p>
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<p id="Kppa6h">In 1949, <em>The New Yorker</em> turned its attention to an unusual new series on the still-new medium of television. Created by Allen Funt, <em>Candid Camera</em> featured a series of pranks performed on unsuspecting people who had no idea they were being filmed. But critic Philip Hamburger didn’t like what he saw.<a href="https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-01-07/flipbook/072/"> He found nothing funny about it</a>, accusing Funt of reducing “the art, the purpose, and the ethics of the ‘documentary’ idea to the level of the obscene.” “For my money,” he continued, “<em>Candid Camera</em> is sadistic, poisonous, anti-human, and sneaky.” That might sound like an overreaction to an episode in which Funt tricked a shopper into bouncing up and down on a mattress and pressured a messenger into delivering a dead fish. But it also sounds like someone who saw, however hazily, the far-reaching implications of what he’d just watched, recognizing that Funt had tapped into forces that would later power reality TV and the comedy of humiliation; forces Funt would discover even he could not always control.</p>
<p id="0YrWnf"><em>Candid Camera</em> continued to air on and off until Funt’s death in 1999. (Funt had a stroke in 1993 and left the show, after which <em>Candid Camera</em> returned in a variety of forms hosted by, among others, Funt’s son Peter, Dom DeLuise, Suzanne Somers, and, most recently, Mayim Bialik.) Under Funt, its formula remained largely unchanged: Funt would film his subjects in surprising, embarrassing situations, usually pitting their impulse to stand up for themselves against their desire to be polite. When the joke had run its course, they’d be let off the hook, often by Funt revealing himself. (Funt was so recognizable in the 1960s that when he ended up on a plane that was being hijacked to Cuba in 1969 a few passengers thought it was a gag—though the number would grow<a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/candid-camera-hijacking/"> as Funt told the tale over the years</a>.) The subjects’ response was almost always a mix of embarrassment, relief, and, sometimes at least, anger.</p>
<aside id="QlyEcB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Psychology of Cringe Comedy: Why We Love to Watch What Hurts Us","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2022/8/18/23310222/cringe-comedy-psychology-history-the-office-rehearsal"},{"title":"Dashed Dreams: Remembering the Cringiest Episode of ‘The Office’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23310195/the-office-making-of-scotts-tots-episode-cringe-comedy"}]}'></div></aside><p id="HOB09e">The show attracted some talented contributors over the years—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi0qNI1EIh4">Fannie Flagg</a>,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGb_jzaUWOg"> Woody Allen</a>, Betty White, Carol Burnett, and<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMMSpM8vukI"> Buster Keaton</a>, who revived some classic routines made nearly unwatchable by Funt’s grainy camera and the cackling audience—and wasn’t without its inspired moments, like an elaborate sight gag involving a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hFO791brc"> car that splits in two</a>. If it’s now difficult to explain why it was so popular for so long, segments of the show—like one in which<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29IDmf8NPUM"> a bunch of Bostonians angrily react</a> to the prospect of a dance club taking up residence in a vacant house—at least double as valuable time capsules for a vanished era. The attitudes animating the show could be a swirl of contradictions, too, as in a 1963 clip in which airline passengers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMuZI5kmpVU">responded to learning that they’d be traveling on the first plane with a female pilot</a> (played by Flagg). It’s tempting to dismiss the premise itself as sexist, but the first female airline pilots were still 10 years in the future at the time and, after their initial shock, most of the interview subjects seemed pretty cool with the idea.</p>
<p id="0gNfTu">For the most part, however, <em>Candid Camera</em> exploited the crudest possibilities of cringe comedy. If Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen are the rocket scientists of finding insights in the uncomfortable act of filming ordinary people—with the important distinction that their subjects know they’re being filmed, even if they’re not always fully clued into the context—Funt now looks like a kid playing with a keg of gunpowder just to see what happens. Especially when you consider Funt’s X-rated 1970 film <em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?</em>, an 85-minute journey to the uncomfortable extremes of the <em>Candid Camera </em>format. (Warning: The Association-inspired light rock theme song will lodge itself into your head for days.)</p>
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<p id="ZLIP0D">Funt made <em>Naked Lady</em> in between incarnations of <em>Candid Camera. </em>When the most successful version of the show concluded its seven-year run on CBS in 1967, Funt found himself with time on his hands and an urge to experiment. He decided to see what he could get away with in movies that he could never try on TV. The time seemed to be right for it. “By a very fortunate circumstance <em>Candid Camera </em>went off the air just at the time that the sex permissiveness was beginning to happen,” Funt told the Associated Press in a 1970 profile. “It coincided with the new kind of cinema in which the standard formulas no longer prevailed.”</p>
<p id="vjW9Qx">With that new permissiveness Funt decided to see how unsuspecting ordinary people would respond when unexpectedly confronted with sexual situations. He opens the film with the bluntest version of this idea, the one promised by the title: a series of clips in which office workers, mostly men, react to encountering a fully naked woman (not counting a sun hat) exiting an elevator. They are, predictably, unnerved and confused, as are the objects of gags offering slight variations on the same theme (a nude hitchhiker, a nude professor, etc.). But as much as Funt seems to enjoy seeing what happens when nude women show up in places nude women don’t normally appear, he also recognizes he can’t keep repeating that gag for the length of the film. And that’s when <em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?</em> gets both more compelling and uncomfortable in ways even Funt couldn’t have foreseen. </p>
<p id="gaoz72">In one sequence—set, like much of the film, to a cutesy song—a tailor caresses the thighs and buttocks of his customers. It’s essentially sexual assualt presented as entertainment. In another queasy-making scene, Funt asks people whether they approve of an interracial couple—the man is played by Richard Roundtree—making out in a bus station. The reactions range from disapproval to shrugs to a man lamenting that his son married a Mexican woman but boasting about their beautiful children. Funt, to his credit, agrees when one of his subjects says, “I think it’s great,” but until that moment it’s not clear who we’re supposed to be siding with. And it’s not clear at all what the intended point is in a chapter headed “A Few Thoughts About Rape,” a collection of short clips of more leering men and nude women bookended by a disturbing scene of a staged assault.</p>
<p id="kww4QM">The most telling time-capsule moments occur when Funt decides to play the part of an amateur Masters and Johnson. In one, Funt has a long, frank discussion with a middle-aged Midwestern woman about how much she enjoys sex and what she enjoys about it, including the occasional bit of S&M. It’s shocking because it now sounds so commonplace, the stuff of countless podcasts and stand-up routines. In another scene, a female interviewer dressed like an East Village hippie asks a man whether he’ll have sex with her only to be told, with a bit of shyness, “Well, like, I’m queer. I dig chicks but I only dig chicks when I’ve <em>known</em> them.” In a separate interview segment a few years before the <em>Roe</em> decision, a man laughs and says, “I’ve got a good gynecologist who got me out of the woods last year with an abortion.” It’s a snapshot of long-ago shattered taboos, freedoms gained and freedoms lost. </p>
<p id="GIvo6C">Not that much of this was evident to viewers in 1970. The film received an X rating at a moment when that wasn’t yet synonymous with pornography, though it certainly signaled that Funt was heading into territory he’d never explored on TV. Reviews largely smirked along with Funt. In the <em>Asbury Park Press</em>, Edward Knoblauch described the scene of the handsy tailor, in his words, “having a field day fitting tight slacks on his young lady customers” as a highlight of a “light, amusing, and entertaining film.” (He saved his objections for a later scene in which a woman was asked to pick out the dirty words from a selection that included choices like “horehound.”) In the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>, Gene Siskel declared it to be a “fresh look at stale attitudes” and lamented the discussions parents and children might have had if they’d been able to attend together.</p>
<p id="wZrrKd"><em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? </em>wasn’t a runaway hit, but it lingered in drive-in double features throughout the ’70s before becoming a cable staple in the ’80s. (It’s not streaming anywhere, but MGM issued a DVD version in 2011.)<em> </em>Today, it looks like anything but ordinary entertainment—to say nothing of a family film—but it’s worth remembering that, while <em>Deep Throat </em>and porno chic were still a few years away, it arrived amid both a wave of skin films designed to take advantage of loosening restrictions and movies like <em>Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice</em> that were trying to make sense of the era’s changing mores. Maybe in his own way, Funt was trying to do the same, even if it now looks like he was using all the wrong tools and applying them recklessly. </p>
<p id="hhNQXh">In some respects, <em>Naked Lady</em> confirms <em>The New Yorker</em>’s worst suspicions of <em>Candid Camera</em> back in 1948. “In reality,” Hamburger wrote, “[Funt] is demonstrating something that spies have known about since spies began to operate; namely, that most people are fundamentally decent and trusting, and, sad to tell, can readily be deceived. […] [He] succeeds in making them look foolish, or in forcing them to struggle against unfair odds, for the vestige of human dignity.” Funt might have claimed to be seeking insight into human behavior, but he came to his experiments with some preconceived notions. What do you say to a naked lady? Of course, like everyone else, you get flustered and can’t figure out <em>what</em> to say, and there’s a bit of cruelty in taking pleasure in others’ discomfort no matter how universal that discomfort might be. It’s feather-light sadism, but sadism all the same.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="vYqBEo">Which raises a lingering question: Is cringe humor, especially cringe humor in nonfiction, possible without cruelty, or is cruelty woven into the form’s DNA? There’s a great divide between YouTube pranksters picking on innocent bystanders and <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm </em>getting the better of Rudy Giuliani, but both are driven by a desire to humiliate. Fielder deflects some criticism by often making himself the center of his experiments in capitalism and sociology, but even his admirers have to grapple with ethical questions. What is clear is that reality television and comedic documentaries as we know them wouldn’t have looked the same without Funt deciding to make a career of embarrassing others, and finding common humanity in our ability to laugh at others’ discomfort with the understanding that, placed in the same situation, it would be our own.</p>
<p id="APZO2b"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311239/allen-funt-candid-camera-what-do-you-say-to-a-naked-lady-cringe-comedyKeith Phipps2022-08-18T07:57:38-04:002022-08-18T07:57:38-04:00Dashed Dreams: Remembering the Cringiest Episode of ‘The Office’
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<p>‘The Office’ made its name by finding comedy in incredibly uncomfortable situations. But even by its own standards, “Scott’s Tots” towers above the rest as too cringe to watch.</p> <p id="xWlZ7i"><em>On Friday, Nathan Fielder will bring a close to the first season of his mind-boggling, skin-crawling HBO series, </em>The Rehearsal<em>. No matter </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/7/15/23219384/the-rehearsal-nathan-fielder-review-hbo-nathan-for-you"><em>how you feel about the show</em></a><em>, one thing that can’t be denied is that it’s pushing the boundaries of cringe comedy. So in its honor, </em>The Ringer <em>hereby dubs today </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311428/welcome-to-cringe-comedy-day"><em>Cringe Comedy Day</em></a><em>. Join us—if you can stop clenching your teeth and covering your eyes—as we celebrate and explore everything the niche genre has to offer.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bCyZF0">The story of the most brutally uncomfortable episode of <em>The Office</em> ever begins with a cute two-word phrase. Executive producer Paul Lieberstein came up with it, wrote it down on a notecard, and threw it onto the writers’ room idea pile. “‘Scott’s Tots,’” fellow <em>Office </em>staffer <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1072409/">Lee Eisenberg</a> says, “was just a notecard in a sea of notecards.” </p>
<p id="HV3Y2c">It didn’t take very much for Lieberstein—who also played one-man HR department Toby on the show—to sell his coworkers on his pitch, which wasn’t as innocent as it sounded: Dunder Mifflin regional manager Michael Scott promised a class of third graders that if they graduated from high school, he’d pay for their college tuition. A decade later, when the tots turned teens hold up their end of the bargain, a still-cash-strapped Michael has to break the news that he doesn’t have the money to make their dreams come true. Naturally, it goes horribly.</p>
<p id="yGPmye">“You knew it was funny, but there obviously was a fine line that you had to ride with it,” says Eisenberg, who cowrote “Scott’s Tots” with his creative partner <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1969144/">Gene Stupnitsky</a>. “It felt like a dangerous episode.” They landed the assignment after writing two other hilariously painful—and classic—episodes of the series, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_Party_(The_Office)">“Dinner Party”</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lover_(The_Office)">“The Lover.”</a> Still, neither is as tough to watch as the one about a middle-aged white guy reneging on an inspirational offer to the kids, most of whom are Black, counting on him. </p>
<p id="1EMdrI">“Scott’s Tots,” which aired on December 3, 2009, is so cringeworthy that it’s hard to sit through. There’s even <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CannotWatchScottsTots/">a 17,000-member Reddit thread</a> just for those who can’t bring themselves to watch it. “‘Scott’s Tots’ came on and I couldn’t find my remote or get to the power plug,” one user wrote, “so ran to the basement and switched power off to the whole house and blew a fuse when I switched it back on.”</p>
<p id="JkJPVC">“It’s so painful,” wrote another. “It hurts so much. I can’t. I just can’t.”</p>
<p id="rGNHpf">But the truth is, the extreme queasiness that “Scott’s Tots” induces is what makes the episode memorable. By the sitcom’s sixth season, Steve Carell had long since turned Michael Scott into one of the most beloved characters in TV history. But occasionally, fans needed to be reminded that the clueless boss’s almost pathological need to be liked could lead to disastrous situations. </p>
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<p id="FrRVuk">“That is sort of this incredible distillation of why we love Michael so much and why he’s made everyone’s life so impossibly difficult,” <a href="https://officeladies.com/transcript-ep-117-scotts-tots-with-bj-novak">B.J. Novak, who directed “Scott’s Tots,” said</a> on Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey’s <em>Office Ladies </em>podcast. “Which is sort of the heart and the comedy of the series. But it’s not usually that intense, you know?” </p>
<p id="mZbYmm">Sometimes, holding down the uneasiness button is worth it. Even if the results are stomach churning. “I think that cringe comedy is not dissimilar from jump-scares and horror—it surprises you,” Eisenberg says. “You know what’s happening. You give the audience a premise that they understand and then you see it to its full potential. And the longer you sit in it, the cringier it gets. It’s almost like when you try a gross food and you want your friend to try it.” </p>
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<p id="J8jPO1">In this case, Eisenberg and Stupnitsky set out to make Michael Scott squirm along with viewers for once. “Just pitching the moves of that story was so fun in its brutality,” Eisenberg says. And Michael’s good intentions, he adds, make his broken promise feel even more<em> </em>hurtful. </p>
<p id="UbD4rz">“If there’s any malice in Michael Scott, I think that story doesn’t work,” says Eisenberg, who also cowrote the hit 2019 comedy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Boys_(film)"><em>Good Boys</em></a><em> </em>with Stupnitsky. “It’s such a generous thing that he offered. And it really shows where that character thought he would be in the future. He thought he was gonna be a millionaire who’d be married to a supermodel and that he’d be famous and that he’d be benevolent and that he’d be a real philanthropist among his many other successes. Maybe he’d be a screenwriter for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iPyz6Yqwl4"><em>Threat Level Midnight</em></a> at that point. But he’d also still be running Dunder Mifflin and be branch manager in Scranton. I think it’s really about dashed hopes and dashed dreams.” </p>
<p id="Hx7CGT">At the start of the episode, Michael seems to understand that he’s done something unforgivable. “What if I told you I had done the worst thing ever?” he asks Jim. “Would you still want to be my friend?” When Jim asks whether he’s murdered someone, he says, “Worse than murder.” Soon, when receptionist Erin asks Pam to check over Michael’s schedule for the day in the breakroom, his misdeed is revealed. After Phyllis, who’s reading over Pam’s shoulder, asks “What’s ‘Scott’s Tots’?” Stanley starts laughing uncontrollably. “Has it really been 10 years?” he says, before the scene cuts to him reading an old newspaper headline: “Local Businessman Pledges College Tuition to Third Graders.” This makes Stanley laugh even harder. </p>
<p id="NIahcO">“It’s so damning,” Eisenberg says. “Because Stanley could’ve told you the moment that that newspaper article came out that there was no chance that it was going to work out.” </p>
<p id="SY3ogn">It’s clear from the outset that no one is going to let this slide. “Michael, this is a terrible, terrible thing you’ve done,” Pam says. When Erin mentions that they’ve rescheduled the trip to the Scott’s Tots’ high school seven times, he grimaces. Hard. “I’ve made some empty promises in my life,” he says after showing off the cards and art projects that the kids made for him over the years, “but hands down that was the most generous.” </p>
<p id="dwnPat">More timid writers may not have subjected the audience to Michael answering for his idiocy. But Eisenberg and Stupnitsky wanted to show him coming clean—and getting pummeled. “If ‘Scott’s Tots’ were the B-story, it wouldn’t have the same effect,” Eisenberg says. “As the A-story, you’re giving it so much time in that classroom. With a story like this, he really is affecting lives.” </p>
<p id="DsbphT">When Erin and Michael visit the school, things start to become truly excruciating. First they pass “The Michael Gary Scott Reading Room.” Then they’re greeted by all of Michael’s now-teenage protégés, who promptly break into a song and dance routine: </p>
<p id="xvpV2d"><em>Hey, Mr. Scott. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Make our dreams come true. </em></p>
<p id="9t3A9E">The rap was one of the first things that Eisenberg and Stupnitsky pitched. For them, seeing it come together in rehearsals was a treat. “The show’s very contained,” Eisenberg says. “So to have a choreographer and to have these incredible dancers practicing in the warehouse for days, a guy doing a flip, is like, ‘Oh my God.’” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="meo3m5"><q>“You knew it was funny, but there obviously was a fine line that you had to ride with it. It felt like a dangerous episode.” —Lee Eisenberg, “Scott’s Tots” cowriter</q></aside></div>
<p id="NdwS25">Before filming the scene, Eisenberg and Stupnitsky noted to Carell that Michael should be delighted by the performance <em>and </em>look like he’s on the verge of an emotional breakdown. He may be about to deliver life-altering bad news to the students, but he’s still Michael Scott. “The idea that someone would write a song and a dance for him would mean a lot to him,” Eisenberg says. </p>
<p id="NnlR2g">As he’s being feted by school administrators and a student named Derrick—who thanks him for giving him the opportunity to “become the next President Obama”—Michael starts to cry. Then he’s invited to the dais to speak. Knowing what’s going to come next makes Carell’s already-brilliant performance even cringier. </p>
<p id="yQYY0p">“Who here’s done something stupid in their lives?” he asks. Before Michael can confess, the school bell rings. For a split second, you think that in typical sitcom fashion, he’ll be saved by it. Nope. It’s only midway through a double period. After stalling, he finally admits that he won’t be able to pay for the class’s college tuition—prompting both the kids and the adults in the room to go through the five stages of grief in real time. Michael’s apology, quite reasonably, does nothing to calm them. “Ending an act with people screaming and then coming back from the act [break] and having people screaming is a very fun thing,” Eisenberg says. </p>
<p id="XEG9xd">This sets the stage for Michael’s half-assed, ridiculous gesture of goodwill. In lieu of tuition money, he offers the teens something that he retrieves from a giant suitcase that Erin had rolled in: laptop batteries. When that does nothing to curb their anger, Michael tries to tout his gifts’ high quality. That was all Carell. “Steve, I believe improvised, ‘They’re lithium!’” Eisenberg says. “It’s such a funny line.”</p>
<p id="GkK4RD">Moments later, Erin and Michael scurry out the school’s front door. But not before Derrick, played by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2501006/?ref_=nm_mv_close">Kwame Boateng</a>, stops Michael and tells him what he did was messed up. “We didn’t want him to leave the school and everyone cheers and it’s tied up in a neat bow,” Eisenberg says. After some prodding, Michael reluctantly agrees to pay for Derrick’s college textbooks. He also makes sure to tell the disappointed student to call him before cashing the yearly $1,000 check. “Michael’s money situation,” Eisenberg adds, “it’s a moving target from day to day.” </p>
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<p id="i0emg8">As they drive back to the office in their last scene in “Scott’s Tots,” Erin soothes a distraught Michael. Until then, he’d still resented her for replacing Pam as his assistant. But their shared misery brings them closer. In the end, they sing, “Hey, Mr. Scott. Whatcha gonna do?” together. It’s a silver lining for Michael—but not the kids he screwed over. “It’s completely psychotic and also it’s a bonding moment,” Eisenberg says. “Like, ‘These two are gonna be OK together.’ They’ve also completely forgotten what that song means and who they’ve hurt during that episode.” </p>
<p id="Vct5jJ">For Michael, it’s a pathetic end to a pathetic day. But as difficult as it is to watch the events unfold, it felt right. “That’s exactly what Michael would do. That’s exactly what Michael would feel,” Novak said on <em>Office Ladies.</em> “It seems like no one’s responding to it saying it’s a bad episode or, ‘Michael wouldn’t do that.’ It’s more just like, ‘It’s so hard to watch.’ So it is consistent, I think, with the show.” </p>
<p id="hzwRq8">Unlike many of the heartwarming late-season American <em>Office </em>story lines, “Scott’s Tots” seemed like it could’ve been a part of the bleaker, more grounded British version of the show. In the writers’ eyes, neither Michael nor the viewers should be let off the hook. “I think a lot of our episodes leaned into that British sensibility,” Eisenberg says. “That cringiness … the exciting thing about cringiness is, how much can the audience withstand?” </p>
<p id="vu4IMA">The answer to that question? It depends on who you ask. Stupnitsky recently told Eisenberg about the Reddit thread for people who avoid “Scott’s Tots.” But Eisenberg doesn’t mind. To him, the fact that so many <em>Office </em>fans can’t sit through it is a gift. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="Gtf8HU">“As a comedy writer, that delights me,” Eisenberg says. “Because it means that it’s not a casual episode of <em>The Office</em>. It’s not one that you forget.” </p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23310195/the-office-making-of-scotts-tots-episode-cringe-comedyAlan Siegel2022-08-18T06:20:00-04:002022-08-18T06:20:00-04:00The Psychology of Cringe Comedy: Why We Love to Watch What Hurts Us
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<p>From ‘Da Ali G Show’ to viral TikTok videos, cringe comedy persists within pop culture. And oftentimes, the genre’s appeal is as much about the way we perceive ourselves as the comics we watch performing it.</p> <p id="MFCtzz"><em>On Friday, Nathan Fielder will bring a close to the first season of his mind-boggling, skin-crawling HBO series, </em>The Rehearsal<em>. No matter </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/7/15/23219384/the-rehearsal-nathan-fielder-review-hbo-nathan-for-you"><em>how you feel about the show</em></a><em>, one thing that can’t be denied is that it’s pushing the boundaries of cringe comedy. So in its honor, </em>The Ringer <em>hereby dubs today </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311428/welcome-to-cringe-comedy-day"><em>Cringe Comedy Day</em></a><em>. Join us—if you can stop clenching your teeth and covering your eyes—as we celebrate and explore everything the niche genre has to offer.</em></p>
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<p id="fN1kzP">Comedy is best enjoyed as a communal experience—or at least, it usually is. When screening Nathan Fielder’s <em>The Rehearsal </em>for a couple of friends, I observed a more mixed response to the so-called “docu-comedy” series, which airs on HBO. Two of us snorted and wheezed as Fielder wore <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Yg7sYzFgIqllulo3UrYi3-FrxzPbppYl0PZ2u5fbtYBJEtrASwMFfca964HOhdzAGqH3t7gxXlQSk_q9qSfoG4aB14xVVBIBNPijY87-kQ0F6OEixyCXFf3_n-JaFLzRDjpyNleZT1nW5HJYLVNO7Ys">dumb outfits</a> or repeated the phrase “cheap chick in the city” ad nauseam. But one member of our viewing party simply could not cope. Somewhere between the reveal that Fielder infiltrated a subject’s apartment without consent and the first scene starring a woman unaware she’s being filmed, this friend had had enough. “<em>Why do you like this?</em>”<em> </em>he wailed. The cry was part question, part anguished lament.</p>
<p id="GD5t7G">Such confusion is common in the face of Fielder’s work, often curdling into <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-cruel-and-arrogant-gaze-of-nathan-fielders-the-rehearsal/amp">outright hostility</a> from frustrated viewers. But it’s also endemic to the art form Fielder takes to new, brain-bending extremes: cringe comedy. A counterintuitive blend of stress and relief, cringe comedy long predates <em>The Rehearsal</em>,<em> </em>and will survive long after. But the show’s run provides an opportunity to evaluate its ironic appeal. If laughter is meant to cure what ails us, what happens when what ails us is also what makes us laugh?</p>
<p id="X7zbl9">The question feels especially relevant in light of cringe’s ever-increasing influence. As a subjective mode of comedy, it’s impossible to pinpoint the origins of cringe humor. (Surely some prehistoric human made a fool of themselves in front of another.) But in film and TV, the 21st century saw an undeniable uptick in projects as uncomfortable to watch as they were enjoyable. Sacha Baron Cohen’s groundbreaking <em>Da Ali G Show </em>premiered on Britain’s Channel 4 just three months into the new millennium; Larry David’s <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm </em>and the original version of <em>The Office, </em>cocreated by and starring Ricky Gervais, followed soon after. <em>Da Ali G Show </em>spun off into massively successful films like <em>Borat </em>and <em>Brüno. The Comeback</em>,<em> </em>a collaboration between <em>Friends</em>’<em> </em>Lisa Kudrow and <em>Sex and the City</em>’s Michael Patrick King, was short-lived at the time, but had enough cult enthusiasts to support a follow-up season nine years later.</p>
<p id="SQZmYA">The early aughts may have felt like a high-water mark for cringe, but the field has only expanded since. There’s Fielder, who started as a correspondent on Canada’s <em>This Hour Has 22 Minutes </em>before debuting his namesake <em>Nathan for You </em>in 2013, plus performers like Joe Pera and Conner O’Malley, who make discomfort the foundation of their work. (O’Malley has written for <em>How to With John Wilson</em>, which Fielder produces.) Cringe has also followed comedy into newer mediums like TikTok. What was Couch Guy, the video of a long-distance couple’s <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/tiktok-couch-guy-internet-sleuths.html">seemingly stilted reunion</a> that went viral last year, if not cringe humor in short, shareable form?</p>
<p id="rIe7Yc">To understand the lasting appeal of cringe comedy, it helps to have a working definition. It’s tempting to chalk the genre entirely up to the eye of the beholder—that, like another <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-4558">polarizing piece of entertainment</a>, you know it when you see it. But the essence of cringe comedy is right there in the name: it’s anything that makes you laugh and also wince, two kinds of involuntary physical response in one potent package.</p>
<p id="Bl8VHA">Psychologically, cringe comedy relies on the observer’s sense of vicarious embarrassment, connecting to someone’s predicament enough to feel on their behalf. It’s a negative feeling rooted in what’s typically seen as a positive attribute: empathy. “You’re really suffering with the other person,” says Sören Krach, a professor of psychiatry at Germany’s Lübeck University who coauthored a <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/4/110">recent paper</a> on cringe comedy. “You’re empathically sharing this awkward state, and it’s not really pleasant.” A key precursor to cringe is the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and feel their pain—almost literally. In <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0018675">prior research</a>, Krach and his collaborators found that vicarious embarrassment activates the same parts of the brain associated with seeing others in physical distress. In this respect, cringe is different from schadenfreude. The cringer identifies with suffering; they don’t experience joy at the sufferer’s expense. (Though, on a show like <em>Succession</em>, it’s possible to experience both.)</p>
<p id="rZTTKN">Cringe comedy, then, relies on proximity. The viewer has to see themselves enough in someone’s plight to respond to it, a quality that may explain the form’s relatively recent popularity. Older instances of cringe are easy to find: improv legends Mike Nichols and Elaine May, for example, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1961/04/15/a-tilted-insight">frequently performed</a> a signature piece called “Pirandello,” in which a staged confrontation between siblings gradually transforms into what appeared to be an actual argument between Nichols and May. (There’s also the career of Andy Kaufman, whose <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOFzOxnTQFw">characters</a> were so complete they were sometimes mistaken for real people.) But shifts in technology have made it increasingly easy to blur the line that separates reality and fiction, and then share that hybrid with a wider audience.</p>
<p id="Bdk946">Beginning with <em>The Office</em>, some of the most classical examples of cringe are so-called mockumentaries, which use the style and tropes of nonfiction filmmaking to tell a crafted story. The handheld camerawork and talking-head interviews only amplify the already mundane horrors of a fluorescent-lit cubicle or a tyrannical boss like David Brent. (The early episodes of <em>Parks and Recreation</em>, in which Leslie Knope was more incompetent than inspirational, were so cringey the show simply pivoted to positivity rather than persist.) <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>, while not a mockumentary, stars <em>Seinfeld </em>cocreator Larry David as Larry David, cocreator of <em>Seinfeld</em>, bulldozing boundaries in largely improvised scenes. Figures like David Brent and Larry David may not be ashamed of themselves, but their shows make it easy to be ashamed on their behalf.</p>
<p id="DiSmXc">With <em>Da Ali G Show</em>, Cohen—and later his disciple Fielder, who collaborated with Cohen on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/15/17574396/who-is-america-sacha-baron-cohen">the 2018 satire</a> <em>Who Is America?</em>—took cringe to new heights (or depths, depending on your point of view). Cohen’s work doesn’t make fiction <em>look </em>like reality; he brings fictional characters, from a Kazakh journalist to an Israeli spy, <em>into the real world</em>, requiring even less work on the viewer’s part to relate his encounters to their own experience. The giddy shock of watching Borat’s “daughter” Tutar <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0motvdA6KRA">bare her bloody crotch</a> at a debutante ball is the same as watching Stephen Colbert’s Bill O’Reilly-ish pundit spar with a <a href="https://www.cc.com/video/6quypd/the-colbert-report-better-know-a-district-district-of-columbia-eleanor-holmes-norton">sitting U.S. Representative</a>, or Fielder’s inscrutable stage persona ask a stranger to say <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtEmJeojY0I">she loves him</a>. Our vicarious embarrassment isn’t on behalf of a made-up person we then assign authentic emotions; it’s felt for <em>real people</em>, requiring fewer steps to a more visceral payoff. The same setup that makes these stunts so effective is also what opens them up to <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dont-want-see-ethics-exploitation-comeback-nathan/">ethical challenges</a>, though their <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/12/nathan-fielder-comedy-central-nathan-for-you">defenders</a> argue cringe artists only call attention to the exploitation others perform unthinkingly.</p>
<p id="L3IKbb">Not coincidentally, then, cringe has risen alongside reality TV, an oxymoronic art that thrives on extreme behavior. (Franchises like <em>90 Day Fiancé </em>are practically powered by cringe.) Mockumentaries echo the lo-fi aesthetic of reality, now instantly recognizable to a generation reared on <em>Real Housewives</em>; shows like <em>Nathan for You </em>adopt reality’s structure, poking at series like <em>Bar Rescue </em>even as their precedent makes it easier to lure unsuspecting subjects. Fielder’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_(TV_series)">next project</a>—the upcoming Showtime comedy <em>The Curse</em>—may be scripted, but it’s no coincidence that it’s set within an HGTV show. </p>
<p id="lIfnU3">But how cringe works is only half of the equation. There’s also the question of why some people are <em>actively drawn </em>to cringe comedy, and what pleasure they derive alongside the pain. Author Melissa Dahl wrote an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cringeworthy-Theory-Awkwardness-Melissa-Dahl/dp/0735211639">entire book</a>, <em>Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness</em>, exploring her own response to social faux pas. (As part of her research, Dahl partook in the cringiest activity on Earth: an amateur improv class.) Dahl draws a distinction between cringe comedy, which is edited and presented to us as entertainment we can opt into, and everyday embarrassment. “It functions almost like a horror movie,” Dahl says. “You get to indulge in this fear, but then it’s OK. You aren’t actually experiencing it, but you have this simulation.” </p>
<p id="UsjbMr">Like horror movies, cringe comedy is a controlled way to expose yourself to what’s otherwise an unavoidable fact of life. Think of cringe as one more meta layer in <em>The Rehearsal</em>’s nesting doll: Just as Fielder’s volunteers are practicing for their actual lives, his fans are putting themselves through the emotional wringer in a more managed environment. And where a jump scare represents one kind of release, giving tension a physical outlet, laughter provides another. The feeling is cathartic, providing a closure that watching, say, a groomsman ramble on too long at a wedding toast typically does not.</p>
<p id="BVEG8O">For that catharsis, cringe’s adjacency to real life once again comes in handy. Cohen may adopt larger-than-life disguises, but many cringe comedians play, implicitly or explicitly, a version of themselves: David and Fielder, of course, but also Lena Dunham in her breakout performance as Hannah Horvath on <em>Girls </em>and Issa Rae as Issa on <em>Insecure. </em>(Rae’s first hit, the YouTube series <em>Awkward Black Girl, </em>advertised its cringe factor up front.) There’s always some layer of artifice involved, but it still takes bravery to debase oneself while barely in character—a trait audiences appreciate, if not always consciously.</p>
<p id="ZbAMAu">“The thing that we admire in cringe comedy is this ability to put yourself or your persona out there,” says Jeremy Dauber, a professor at Columbia University who’s written on the <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393356298">history of Jewish comedy</a>. (Many cringe comics, like many comics in general, are members of the tribe.) “[They’re] putting all these unattractive and messy human emotions on display.” That emotion might be the petty spite that torpedoes all of David’s onscreen relationships, or the neediness that leads Horvath to tolerate terrible sex with an ambivalent guy. We’re rarely willing to acknowledge these qualities in ourselves; there’s something freeing, yet terrifying, about artists who choose to put it all on the surface.</p>
<p id="e7d9xs">By projecting our anxiety onto someone else, cringe comedy can also make it easier to accept our own flaws. “You feel somehow revealed or detected by those situations,” Krach says. “It precisely hits on something in yourself.” Cringe often comes with a reassurance that we aren’t alone in our crippling insecurities, without the sometimes insurmountable hurdle of disclosing your own inner thoughts.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="llyyF2">You can’t blame anyone who can’t handle cringe comedy. But its enduring—and increasing—allure isn’t as mysterious as it may first appear. “I came to appreciate them as little moments that wake you up out of life in a way,” Dahl says of her own experiences with cringe. Pleasant or not, cringe puts us in touch with a part of humanity we spend the rest of our lives trying to keep out of sight. No wonder we can’t help but flinch.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2022/8/18/23310222/cringe-comedy-psychology-history-the-office-rehearsalAlison Herman