Cringe Humor on Screen and in Digital Media

This volume is the first book-length study of 21st-century English-language cringe humor on screen and in digital media. The book includes quantitative and qualitative analyses of verbal and multimodal cringe humor by international linguists interested in its conditions of emergence and success. It examines the sociocultural variables involved in its reception and sheds new light on audience reactions—from alignment to disaffiliation and resistance to empathy. This book reveals that, while not unanimously championed, cringe humor thrives in the 21st century, drawing on its inherent ambivalence and leveraging the affordances of new media to navigate the post-politically correct ethical complexities of laughing at embarrassing behavior. With its cross-disciplinary, pragmatically grounded approach, this book will interest scholars and students in Linguistics, Media and Cultural Studies, and Psychology.

Virginie Iché is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France. She authored L’esthétique du jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll (2015) and co-edited (with S. Sorlin) The Rhetoric of Literary Communication (2022).

Célia Schneebeli is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Université Bourgogne Europe, France. She researches online discourse and discourse in interaction from a pragmatic perspective. She has published on impoliteness, humor, stance-taking, and image use in digital discourse.

Lynn Blin is Honorary Associate Professor in Linguistics and Translation at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France. She has published work on Alice Munro and Lydia Davis, and more recently on the ethics of laughter in the works of Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K. and David Sedaris.