The Images That Make You Feel Pain page has been making its fans feel uncomfortable since 2020 and has 1.5 million followers. It's another page in the vast array of meme content on the Internet where the name of the game is nonsense and cringe. Somehow, netizens came to love and adore cringe, as it's one of the most prevalent forms of comedy online today.
Some people attribute it to schadenfreude; that we like to take pleasure from someone else's misfortune. That's why we love trashy reality TV and chuckle at an image of someone burning their pizza to a black crisp. But cringe is not just about laughing at someone else. It's not 'punching down' comedy.
We've never been as connected as we are in this digital social media age. 20 years ago, we only had our family members and friends to give us second-hand embarrassment. And there weren't many opportunities to showcase our own cringy behavior like there are now.
Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for The Atlantic about how in the old days of the Internet, cringe was about empathy. For example, we felt embarrassed watching the Star Wars kid, proclaiming, "It's hard to watch." We thanked our lucky stars it was not us in that video and felt dread for the person who was in it.
Sören Krach, a professor of Psychiatry at Lübeck University in Germany, told The Ringer how cringe is rooted in empathy. "You're really suffering with the other person. You're empathically sharing this awkward state, and it's not really pleasant." If the person who observes the cringe wouldn't be able to put themselves into another's shoes and feel their pain, the whole concept wouldn't work.
Sometimes, people conflate cringe with shock. In their eyes, cringe is supposed to be shocking, to make one so uncomfortable they might want to crawl out of their skin. But that's not true. At least according to the person who started the r/cringe subreddit, Michael Dombkowski. "In the early days, we would get a lot of people posting stuff that just didn't really match what I was looking for, or people who would post videos of people breaking bones or, like, gross-out stuff," he told The Atlantic.
"I hated that," Dombkowski went on. "It really bothered me. I always saw these videos as an empathetic exercise. It was always like, 'Oh, I could totally see myself doing this,' or it just felt like one of those nightmares where you're at school with no pants or something. It just fills you with dread for that person."
In a previous interview for Bored Panda, comedy scholar Dr. Steven S. Kapica also emphasized that cringe comedy is not about punching down. "Shock is not cringe. If comedy generally relies on incongruity and types of comedy are defined by their particular brand of incongruity, then cringe is the outlier, the absurd exception. Cringe does not emerge from a reversal or distortion of a premise, nor does it emerge from oppositional stances," he explained. "Cringe does not point out incongruity. It breaks incongruity."
