Tim Robinson and the Golden Age of Cringe Comedy (Published 2023)

Comedy is pain relief.

They tend to be more comfortable in the role of jeremiad—warning of lost humanity, warmth and wisdom—or playfully pulling apart the strange dynamics of networked relationships, rather than offering even a fuzzy route to a better future. But that is probably exactly what we should want and expect of art.

The horror of awkwardness is partly the feeling of isolation, of feeling like we’re uniquely marked out and alienated by our social ineptitude. The promise of awkward comedy is that we’re not. We can read this either as benign reassurance, or a more malign type of schadenfreude.

I also realized then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance.

All these comics now, it's almost like the point is to get in trouble. It's like, "Why are you giving me shit? I'm a comic, I'm allowed to say whatever I want." That's wrong, as far as I'm concerned. People t

Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.