In the “age of cringe” (Schwanebeck 2021) and parallel to the emergence of “cringe comedy” on television (Middleton 2014, Hye-Knudsen 2018), the internet and social media have seen a multiplication of content tagged or referred to as “cringe” or “cringeworthy”. The #cringe hashtag has become a familiar tag and there are now multiple accounts and pages devoted to the curation of cringey content : cringe compilations on YouTube, Twitter accounts such as “cringe worthy tweets”, “images that are unbelievably cringe”, Instagram accounts such as “cringe hub”, subreddits such as “Cringetopia”, “TikTok cringe”, “Cringe Purgatory”, “Cringeopolis”, “Cringepics”, and pages on Facebook such as “Cringe Posting”. So much so that “cringe”, which fundamentally expresses the reaction one has when feeling “very embarrassed and uncomfortable about something” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “ disgusted” (Collins Dictionary), to the point of “recoil[ing] in distate” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), has become an established category of entertainment online. In this context, it now refers to a type of content that aims to provoke a more paradoxical feeling of simultaneous “mirth and embarrassment” (Attardo 2023: 275), which rightfully belongs to cringe humor (“humor in which the hearer experiences vicarious embarrassment on behalf of one or some of the participants of the humor”, Attardo 2023: 274). This study investigates viewer’s reception of this type of content in a corpus of 1617 comments posted on a video called “Reddit Cringe Compilation 1 | Most Awkward Moments 2022”, which was posted on the YouTube channel Top Clips!, formerly known as “Entertainment Daily”. The main research question addressed in this quantitative and qualitative study is: do viewers align with the expected affective stance expected in response to cringe humor, which is a mixture of mirth and embarrassment? An additional question when it comes to identifying expressions of embarrassment is: how do users cringe online? Using the Benign Violation Theory (BVT, Warren and McGraw 2015) as theoretical framework, the paper consequently explores the delicate balance necessary for cringe humor to succeed. Indeed, while the BVT builds upon the incongruity theory of humor, it argues that the violation of our expectations that is necessary for humor to arise must have a negative valence, but that this negative valence has to remain benign enough for the violation to be acceptable. As the study shows, viewers reactions prove how delicate that balance is, between what is funny and what is downright threatening or revolting.