Painful Laughter: Media & Politics in the Age of Cringe

This project brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines (including sociology, cultural studies, neuroscience, film and media studies) to investigate the experience of cringe as a key symptom of the contemporary cultural landscape. Cringe humour and other cringeworthy experiences across the media articulate a deeply-felt discomfort, one that is linked to the inability to successfully adopt political correctness, and to changing attitudes in the cultural mainstream. The experience of cringe involves the inability to extricate yourself (or to look away) from unpleasant situations, resulting in feelings of vicarious shame (Fremdschämen), for example when watching diplomatic blunders committed by prominent statesmen, uncomfortable ‘dare you’ challenges on social media platforms, and the kind of ‘unstable jokes’ to be found in transgressive comedy formats that involve protected groups like ethnic minorities and disabled people, even though the targets of the jokes are not always clear.

The symposium took place from Oct. 14 to 16, 2020, at Schloss Herrenhausen in Hannover, as part of the Herrenhäuser Konferenzen, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. See the complete conference programme for further details.

A short conference report was published in the Universitätsjournal.

The conference proceedings were published as a special issue of the journal Humanities (2021).

Speakers

Jonathan Bignell ▪ Linda Heß ▪ Philip Jacobi ▪ Katja Kanzler ▪ Sören Krach ▪ Beck Krefting ▪ Thomas Morsch ▪ Eckhard Pabst ▪ Anette Pankratz ▪ Nele Sawallisch ▪ Stefanie Schäfer ▪  Willem Strank ▪ Cornelia Wächter ▪ James Walters ▪ Gesine Wegner ▪ Stefan Wellgraf ▪ Patrick Wöhrle

The event included a live conversation with filmmaker Robert B. Weide, the director of various documentaries on the history of American comedy, as well as director and co-creater of Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO).