Cringe is unavoidable on TikTok. In fact, it’s addictive. While many of the excruciating song covers and painful-to-watch comedy skits are accidental in their ability to make us grimace, recoil and generally feel like we want to tear out our eyes, a number of creators have emerged whose sole mission is to make you feel as uncomfortable as possible while watching their content. Introducing: meta-cringe.
Mainstream pop culture has been unashamedly cringe for a long time, from Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, which thrives on awkward silences, to Taylor Swift advising NYU students to “Learn to live alongside cringe” during a speech given at their graduation ceremony. Even TikTok’s algorithm deciding to make everyone obsessed with Matty Healy’s on-stage ramblings reveals our gluttony for cringe. Now creators are entering a new meta-cringe era to satirise the internet’s earnest calls to embrace our cringe-est base nature.
Okay, so what is it? According to Urban Dictionary, “Meta-cringe is the act of cringing at somebody who is deliberately aware of what makes you and most people cringe.” (Cringe, meanwhile, although it feels past the point of explanation now, is the shortened term of “cringey”, which is the shortened term of “cringeworthy”. Either self-inflicted or experienced secondhand, cringe refers to the embarrassment of witnessing or experiencing something that is awkward or uncomfortable.) From TikTok thirst traps to parodies, cringe content thrives on the internet, so much so that certain creators are now intentionally making “tough to watch” videos to tap into our masochistic tendencies.
Discussing the subject in the Substack Embedded, Kate Lindsay writes that one thing that cringe TikTok content has in common “is a particular comment you’ll find beneath most of them: ‘Another tough watch, thanks!’ Success is measured by how difficult it was for the viewer to get through.”
“This was EXCRUCIATING..thank you,” one comment reads on Veronika Slowikowska’s video. The video, which shows Veronika practising a joke in the mirror before delivering it to a table of people to toe-curling silence, has 1.6 million views. The TikTok creator and comedian currently has 71.6K followers and creates content which has the power to cause genuine anguish. For Veronika, cringe comes from the kind of situations where our earnest desire to fit in becomes exposed.
“Right now in comedy the more earnest [the character] the better,” says the Toronto-based creator. “The characters are on this line of what’s real and what’s not. The humour plays with the idea of what happens when the curtain drops and a person is revealed.” Veronika sees a contrast between this type of awkward comedy and the highly curated clean girl trends that have recently dominated FYPs. She explains, “as much as we love it, it’s bullshit. Where’s your midday breakdown? Where’s you going through your fourth bowl of cereal?”
Cringe as a genre can be traced back to the early noughties. A time of the “awkward turtle”, doing the nae nae and planking, cringe was inherent in the culture. 2009 saw the birth of Cringeworthy.net, which was a platform dedicated to cringe-inducing “fails”. Creators such as Miranda Sings and Fred Figglehorn ruled the YouTube algorithm and comedies which displayed the nascent beginnings of earnest meta-cringe, such as The Office and Da Ali G Show, were at the height of their popularity.
Today though, there’s a heightened self-awareness driving the meta-cringe movement, fuelled by our often decades-long presence on multiple platforms. We spend so long online we’ve reached a point where you can’t tell if the person is being sincere or ironic. Veronika notes, “I think every app weirdly has their own sense of humour and language”. Rather than the over-the-top characters of the noughties, today’s meta-cringe personas are more subtle, all too familiar, playing on the fact we’ve spent so much time cultivating our online personas that nothing seems to come naturally anymore.
Veronika gets much of her inspiration from the anomalous TikToks sandwiched between viral dances and dog videos; the kind of videos that completely lack self-awareness to produce organic and genuine cringe. “I love the videos with 20 likes of some random mom cooking dinner for her kids with the scariest filter on — I love shit like that,” she explains. “Just like real people not trying to be funny, but I find it hilarious. It’s so out of touch, I love it.”
This self-awareness, or lack of it, is also the distinction between what Rebecca Jennings for Vox termed “millennial cringe” (when “epic bacon” was the height of comedy) and the type of meta-cringe that is flourishing online today. As Don Caldwell, the editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, explains, millennial cringe existed at a “time on the early internet before people had to navigate through a million layers of irony to understand a meme”. The humour was earnest and un-selfconscious.
Today’s meta-cringe humour plays on that earnestness while at the same time poking fun at it, sitting between sincerity and subversion. “Meta has been my word lately,” says Veronika. “I’ve zoomed out too much where I’m like, is it cringe that I’m pretending to be cringe now? Is it cringe to be on TikTok? It’s a meta of a meta of a meta thing.”
It’s hard to understand why we keep coming back for more of this content that is, by its very definition, painfully hard to watch. Perhaps there’s something in the comfort of seeing other people’s cringe moments, or in taking the power away from what we might consider to be humiliating Ls in our own life. “We all feel like losers sometimes,” says Veronika. “I think everyone’s over trying to be perfect because it’s not sustainable.” In an era where if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, you can either laugh at yourself or laugh at someone else. As long as you aren’t being cruel it can be cathartic.
Meta-cringe online blurs the lines between sincerity and irony. But ultimately it doesn’t matter either way. This carefree perspective is an inevitable by-product of today’s social and political landscape, with a daily barrage of news and trend cycles that are near impossible to keep up with. Cringe is inherently subjective, based on how ‘out of touch’ you are, but the visceral shudder is also more than that; a physical reminder you are still alive and things could always be worse, or more embarrassing, even as the world burns and society crumbles, cringe is here to stay. Just in a meta, way-too-online format.