In case you are part of the sorry lot who don’t follow me on social media, I routinely post videos of myself dancing around my kitchen like a complete lunatic. A previous version of me, one who had shame, would never have done such a thing. The feedback I get, ranges from “I saw your dance video!” to the complete silent treatment from the many voyeur-types who watch my stories like little creeps. In other words, it’s not super affirming. But I persevere, posting my videos all the livelong day, because making dance videos in my kitchen brings me joy, and because I do not really care what people think of my social media presence. Last month, however, I posted what I found to be a very funny video. I may be a clown, but I don’t portend to know what comedy is. I do know that the video was funny to make and funny to watch, so I think it was funny. This time, one of the responses stopped me in my tracks. “Cringe masterpiece thank u,” DMed @tiocreamy, a friend of a friend.
Cringe. The word we’re culturally obsessed with, yet fear. The word that inspires the hair on one’s arms to stand at attention. The word that screams, “Please Lord, don't let it be me.” I was honored. I felt seen.
There are many definitions of the word cringe: second-hand embarrassment, extreme awkwardness, revulsive earnestness. You don’t have to look hard for cringe on the internet—it’s in progress videos; Day X videos, where people update you on some trend no one asked for; overly sincere celebrity TikToks, and yes of course, dance videos. Whichever flavor you choose, cringe elicits a strong, visceral reaction, which is part of its particular abhorrence. One doesn’t simply watch something cringe and shrug their shoulders and move on. The word itself is an action—to experience cringe means to squeal, shriek and scream, “make it stop!”
If you’re concerned with being a palatable human in civil society, which of course we clowns are not, being called cringe feels like being lobbed across the face with something slick and filthy. It’s a badge of uncoolness both in that missable, sad kinda way, and also the actively-hamming-it-up kinda way. Many performers (hams) are for this reason very familiar with this word and, whether they admit it or not, obsess about being “cringe.” The double edged sword with cringe in the age of the internet is that it’s often impossible to know whether we are in fact cringe. The verdict is issued by the voyeurs watching, privately mocking and reviling at a distance through social media, rarely letting the object of cringe in on the fact that they have entered the place of no return. Which is why so often cringe and shame, embarassment’s twin flame, are so interwoven. Once the pendulum swings from embarrassment to shame, you meet your ol’ pals self-loathing, lovelessness, and isolation (thank you Brenee Brown for all you’ve done here). So there’s a lot to risk in being cringe!
But a clown loves risk, and all clowns are fiends for cringe. For one thing, clowns exist in the space of live theater: intimate, interpersonal and immediate. A clown hears the shrieks and gasps from the audience and is able to respond to them, playing with the audience’s reactions. Generally, material that inspires strong reactions—even if it’s disgust, even if it’s a rallying cry to “make it stop!”—is clown gold. Clowns are always playing on the edge, taking something a bit too far and then walking it back, and pushing it forward again until they find a game, a building of trust, a moment of acknowledgement that they’re a little mischievous and they know it. At the last Joedome, a clown competition show that takes place in a small black box in the parking lot of a Jon’s, for which you need a door code and a strong immune system to enter, Luke Dellorso did a bit with John Bradford, who played a cowboy who had lost his lizard (classic stuff). Luke, who uses they/them pronouns, came out “dressed” as a lizard, which meant they were buck naked aside from a tube sock over their penis, covered from head to butt in green body paint. They walked the aisles of the crowd asking for food, to shrieks of “go away,” “ew,” and “no no no.” Then, Luke climbed on top of the black stage dividers, way too high for a human to jump from, and jumped down, nearly losing their tube sock and further exposing themselves. The audience by now was fully shrill. Then Luke tackled John, leaving him spread-eagled on the floor and glistening in Luke’s trail of green body paint. To be clear, there was nothing ick about Luke’s body or performance. It was immaculate. It was also extremely cringe in its vulnerability, and in its exposure. In this performance, our clowns wore their stupidity, pleasure, play, joy, and vulnerability openly—all of the makings of cringe-worthy material. And because they’re clowns, they not only had an openness to ridicule, they invited it.
Cringe is such an interesting word because it communicates less about the person doing the cringey thing than it does about the cringe-r. More often than not, people who we deem cringe, are having a grand old time. Rather, it’s the folks watching who are jumping out of their own skin. Not all people cringe uniformly at the same things, and when we do, it’s usually because we feel some level of identification in the thing we’re cringing at. It’s a form of distancing ourselves from the thing we’re experiencing to call it cringe, and the fact that we’re cringing at it assumes a level of closeness to it. We can’t have a strong emotion to something that doesn’t affect us, and we’re so affected because we see a part of ourselves in the person inspiring us to cringe. For a clown, this connection with the audience, even if it’s eliciting a squirm, is better than the distanced safety of no reaction at all. In fact, for the clown, cringe is often the goal, not just a hazard of the job.
As a quick aside, there’s an entire subgenre of comedy called cringe comedy, with an accompanying Wikipedia entry listing the likes of Fleabag, Da Ali G Show (which I find to be the most exceptional piece of comedy I’ve ever seen, and not cringe in the slightest), Nathan for You, and The Office as examples of cringe comedy. Of course cringe is subjective, so depending on who you talk to and what flavor of discomfort bordering on pleasure bordering on disgust makes the hair on their chinny chin chins stand at attention, they’ll have a different take. Personally, my top contenders for old school pre-internet cringe include John Waters, king of cringe (remember the egg scene in Pink Flamingos?), and Jim Carrey’s dance routine to Cuban Pete in The Mask. However, none of these examples hold a candle to the cringe potential of a clown—rather, these examples presume a coolness, a control, often sarcasm (itself a distancing tool) of what we deem cringe comedy. I’m not here to debate if we’re in a post cringe era, or post post cringe era, as every other think piece obsessed with the zeitgeist has already debated. But I do think embracing cringe is in some ways the logical response to the distanced, biting quality of the sarcastic comedy of yore by the likes of Phoebe-Waller Bridge, Steve Carrell, Bill Murray and Ricky Gervais. Or to the perfection and innocence of twee. These things are in fact the polar opposite of cringe—cool, distanced, in control—and have no business in the sandbox of a clown.
There are literally hundreds of examples of cringey clown shows I’ve attended. But I will leave you all with one final pièce de résistance. At Zack Zucker’s last Stamptown show, Christina Catherine Martinez performed as a woman with mysterious ailments needing help from the audience. She prompted a volunteer to stand center stage and recite the last love he had. Alone and defenseless, he held out the flapping piece of paper Christina provided to him and spoke of his last love from the heart. It was impeccably cringe. Then Christina came out wearing just a bed sheet with a slice of pizza between her legs. She was suffering from an ailment which was pizza in her vagina and she needed him to eat it. Willingly, we watched him put his face between her legs, and then disappear from view as he put the sheet over his head. He in no uncertain terms went to (clown) town. It was disgusting and vulnerable and moving, it was cringe and it was perfectly clown.
ICN is written by me Isabella Kulkarni, and edited by Emma Colón.
Catch ya next time you beautiful fools!
Follow me @ibbykirk to see me bare it all.
Cringe is good when there’s a concept.