LAUSR

ABSTRACT Comedy has long been cast as the linchpin of a space of ludic, non-purposive play. Yet the subgenre ‘cringe comedy’ stakes out a space ruled not by the lighthearted aesthetic of the ‘funny’ but by the stressful, labor-intensive aesthetic of the ‘awkward’. Why, then, has comedy has become so much work? Tracking this now well-established comic formation across a range of media platforms, this essay shows that the ‘awkward’ comic figure on which cringe comedy centers is, morphologically, barely distinguishable from a comic figure of far longer standing – a figure characterized, as Henri Bergson has demonstrated, by his rigid, mechanical inelasticity. This essay, then, ascribes the drastically different aesthetic apparatus that now converges around this figure to the late capitalist premium on play, which sees practices and capacities long associated with play pressed into the service of economic profit. Once an establishment figure amusingly in thrall to a prevailing work ethic, the rigid, labored ‘mechanical’ has become an unruly, renegade ‘awkward’, troublingly out of step with the so-called ‘duty of hilarity’ that now dominates the spheres of production and reproduction – a figure, that is, in need of the kind of onerous comic labor of which s/he is now the target.