Parallel to the emergence of “cringe comedy” on television in the early 2000s, the internet and social media have witnessed a multiplication of content labeled as “cringe” or “cringeworthy”. The #cringe hashtag has become a familiar tag and there are now multiple accounts and pages dedicated to the curation of cringeworthy content, some of which are very popular. This widespread attention has elevated “cringe”—a term which fundamentally describes the feeling of being “very embarrassed and uncomfortable about something” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “disgusted” (Collins Dictionary), to the extent of “recoil[ing] in distaste” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)—into an established category of entertainment online. In this context, “cringe” now refers to a genre of content that aims to provoke a paradoxical feeling of simultaneous amusement and embarrassment, which rightfully belongs to what is now known as “cringe humor”. This study examines viewers’ reception of cringe content in a corpus of 1061 comments posted on a cringe compilation video posted on YouTube in 2022. The main research question addressed in this study is: Do viewers align with the affective stance—simultaneous amusement and embarrassment—expected in response to a video explicitly tagged as #cringe and described as “meant for entertainment purposes”? To address this question, the study conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis of user comments, focusing on two key aspects: expression of discomfort and expression of amusement. In exploring users’ reception of cringe humor, the study additionally documents both the ways users “cringe” online and the specific triggers that elicit this reaction.