Breaking the Fourth Wall with Cringe
When funny gets painful.
Table of Contents
There’s something powerful about cringe comedy at a time like this, where slowing down and studying the bizarre anatomy of everyday theater feels like a cold-plunge meditation for speed-living. You may know the feeling from the situational awkwardness of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cathartic relatability of The Office, the fourth-wall-breaking realism of Fleabag, and more recently, the “what-the-fuck-did-I-just-watch” absurdism of The Rehearsal.
It’s hard to crown the King (or Queen) of Cringe at a time when everyone’s neurotically re-writing their own script. But when it comes to post-pandemic meta-theater, season 2 of HBO’s The Rehearsal offers a smorgasboard of thought-provoking cringe-wisdom that’ll make you rethink everything you know about “being yourself”.
It’s the quirkiest execution of “all the world’s a stage” while nodding to ghosts of comedians past. Creator and producer Nathan Fielder is obviously fascinated with role-play. He’s been trying to tell us for nearly two decades. But in orchestrating his latest wildly-expensive thought experiment, he poses a serious question:
How do you know when to stop playing along?
Performing sincerity
(The Rehearsal, S2, HBO)
Some call it “genius”, others consider his gaze “cruel and arrogant”. But for filmmaker Errol Morris, this is simply “weird science”.
Fielder’s work is certainly unique, and any brand of comedy involving the neurotic deconstruction of everyday life somehow captures the spirit of behavioral science. An obvious one for me is Canadian sociologist and dramaturg Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self, Asylums), who immersed himself in social situations to study his subjects, then defamiliarized their interactions to unveil theatrical patterns hidden in plain sight.
For eons, jesters, comedians, and satirists have been doing something similar. Fielder’s own mother, a social worker, seems to think of his work as “ethnomethodology”—and it’s not a stretch. Most observational comedy mimics the structure of a behavioral experiment, requiring the researcher to blend in to answer the pestering riddle: is sincerity itself is a performance?
Many have noted The Rehearsal‘s similarity to the work of Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York, Adaptation), who explores the anxiety of being your “self”. But something about conveying these existentialist ideas in the language of improvised comedy—leaving just enough room so anything can happen—makes this red-pill entertainment both absurd and hysterical, an unusual flavor that makes “truth” more digestible for the audience, and affirming for the clown.
Breaking the fourth wall
(The Rehearsal, S2)
“I’ve always felt that sincerity is overrated. It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.”
It’s no surprise bewildered fans often wonder about “the real Nathan Fielder”. It’s the thing entertainers grapple with all the time. Where does Larry David the writer end and Larry David the character begin? What’s Dave Chappelle like behind closed doors? Is Conan as nice off-camera? And who on god’s green earth is the “real” Jordan Schlansky?
The mystery, of course, is that there is no mystery. Great entertainment blurs that line to keep the gag going. It’s similar to the mystique generated by the inscrutable Andy Kaufman—the enigmatic performance artist and inspiration for the R.E.M. song “Man on the Moon“—who kept audiences on edge with unpredictable bits delivered with total commitment.
“I don’t know if you’re laughing at me or with me.”
(Saturday Night Live, 2014)
It’s unsettling. Uncomfortable. You feel it in the pit of your stomach. And sometimes that’s the whole point. Sometimes great performances reflect our need for a cue-card, our need to be told what to think and how to feel. So much of our daily decision-making is a reflection of this self-imposed puppetry. We blame the world for a façade that wouldn’t exist without our applause.
According to actor Judd Hirsch who worked with the comedian on Taxi, Andy Kaufman was simply “a guy who, if he could fool you long enough to believe something, which is really what actors do, then he wins.”
But even professional acting has rules. So when someone breaks the fourth wall and turns the spotlight on us, our world goes upside down. We have a physical reaction. What do we do, how do we react? It mirrors a situation we desperately wish to escape—that we’re somehow complicit in the staging of “madness”. Kaufman frequently exposed this through his off-beat characters, including the one he played on Taxi, which prompted acting powerhouse Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) to say:
“It’s fascinating. I don’t know whether it’s the innocence of the fellow… or the feeling you have that he’s not stupider than everybody, but maybe smarter, that adds to the fascination.”
Orson Welles, The Merv Griffin Show (1982)
Life is cringe
L: King of Comedy (1982)
R: Joker (2018)
“Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.”
We all know life is stranger than fiction. We don’t applaud each other for performing “sincerely”, and rarely do we end up on talk-shows winning over an audience. The greatest applause a good actor can get in “real” life is for someone to simply believe in them. Whether they’re sincere or cynical, we may never know. But through this great surrender, life goes on.
That’s why “cringe” is such an important part of discernment. It’s the awareness of being trapped in a moment you can’t escape.
There’s a reason, after all, “cringe” comedy often feels cathartic, kind of like being on a roller-coaster. It’s a manifestation of our neurosis—a controlled situation by which to experience a total lack of control. A joy-ride. That’s what observational comedy unpacks through re-constructions of painfully awkward moments. They help us face the unfaceable. And they do it by transporting us to that place of “in-betweenness”… where the rules of “normal” behavior no longer apply.
Nathan For You, S4, E5
Despite our delusional allegiance to “the whole truth”, we are constantly revealing our (much more desperate) need for consensus in order to maintain self-soothing narratives. We validate “sincerity” through theatrical conventions whose theatricality we fundamentally deny. It’s all kind of absurd and hysterical, and trying to control it, even more so. Here’s how Fielder reacted to some people’s inability to face this underlying tension:
“When I hear the word “cringey” and someone’s like, “I can’t handle it”, I wonder how that person can go through life at all. Because every interaction is horrendous. Almost all, in some way. Like, nothing ends with a cut when you’re in real life. Like, sometimes… there’s nothing else to say and everyone has subtext of things they’re not saying to each other and that feels, like, “normal”. So, it’s interesting that people have a hard time with it.”
What’s more hysterical is how we validate each other’s performances based on vague, hard-to-pin-down metrics of sincerity that have nothing whatsoever to do with “the truth”. In other words, how do you know who’s sincere and who isn’t in a world where the prerequisite for all communication is quite simply… to believe?