Cringe comedy derives its humor from social awkwardness: misunderstandings, embarrassment, and flirtation gone wrong, among other cringe-inducing items. Cringe comedies are the kind of show that some people can only watch through their fingers, so intense is the second-hand embarrassment.
Cringe comedy is funny in part because it's relatable. Everyone has had far more awkward moments than they'd like, and many can look back even years later on social gaffs that still make them shudder. Cringe comedy gives audiences a chance to watch these situations from a safe distance and get a laugh out of them for once. Live-action doesn't have a monopoly on the genre, however, as evidenced by these great cringe comedy anime.
8 Tsurezure Children
The teenage years are rightly regarded as one of the most awkward periods in life: puberty, young love, new schools, and new friends tend to hit teens like a train dropped off a skyscraper. Tsurezure Children does a fantastic job at capturing that painful, transitional feeling of young love between high school students.
The series' short scenes and omnibus format won't appeal to everyone, but, for those looking for a healthy dose of blushing, sweating, and panicking between painfully awkward kisses, Tsurezure Children should be just the thing. Its episodes are all fairly short as well, making it a great series to watch in bursts.
7 Nichijou
When one stops to think about it, it's no surprise that there's a huge crossover between school anime and cringe comedy anime. Schools are breeding grounds for the kind of cheek-reddening incidents that these shows live off of, and that's assuming a relatively normal and functional cast.
The cast of Nichijou is neither normal nor functional. The series is a slice-of-life about three high school friends: a young genius, a talking cat, and a robot. Nichijou excels at rapid-fire transitions from ordinary incidents like walking to school to exceptionally strange ones, such as the school principal suplexing a deer (a fan-favorite incident). No one here is well-adjusted, and that's the point.
6 Keijo!!!!!!!!
Keijo!!!!!!!! is a special breed of cringe comedy. It is one of a handful of shows that is hilarious and cringey at every level. It is a sports anime, but, given that the sport revolves around girls trying to push one another off a small platform into the water, the entire plot really just functions as a giant spoon with which to feed its viewers fan service.
The competition is treated with the same over-stylized aggression and drama as any shonen battle anime, which in itself is both funny and whince-inducing. Though deeply weird and unabashedly lowbrow, Keijo!!!!!!!! does what it does exceptionally well and deserves credit for that if nothing else.
5 Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun lives at the intersection of straight-faced performance and outlandish dialogue. Its cringe can be a little inconsistent, but when it hits, viewers are unlikely to forget it anytime soon.
Watching its cast of lovable goofs perform the emotional equivalent of slipping on banana peels is more than enough to keep the audience coming back. Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun won't win any awards for groundbreaking animation, but it nails jokes and characterization alike. Misunderstanding, unrequited love, and a never-ending stream of awkward make the series what it is. Simple and effective cringe content.
4 Attack On Titan: Junior High
The massive popularity of Attack on Titan is in part thanks to the horrific threat posed by the titular titans: grotesque humanoids bent on consuming all in their path. Attack on Titan: Junior High takes the politics and flesh-eating of the original series and replaces them with chibi characters in junior high.
It's delightful to see beloved characters like Eren, Mikasa, and Armin in a conventional school setting, but it's also rather jolting. Funny? Undoubtedly. It's more than just the jokes that are cringe-worthy here, though. Some might argue that the very premise of taking a show like AoT and turning it into...this...is cringe in itself.
3 Noucome
My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy, aka Noucome, stands on a bedrock of cringe comedy, and its position is unshakable. Kanade Amakusa suffers from a curse known as Absolute Choices, forcing him to select an action from the two or three options that are presented to him.
Unfortunately, the choices Kanade is forced to make are frequently strange, perverse, or humiliating, causing him to become the school outcast. Most viewers won't be able to stop themselves from cringing as they watch Kanade doing spontaneous impressions of a seal or London Bridge in the middle of class, and that's exactly what the series intends.
2 Food Wars
Soma Yukihira enrolls at an elite culinary school to perfect his cooking skills and one day surpass even his professional chef father. One would expect an anime with such a premise to be just another cooking show like any other. Just like real cooking though, presentation counts for a lot, and in Food Wars, presentation means characters with an over the top reaction to delicious food.
While the plot development may be predictable, the hijinks are hilarious, and, as an added bonus, viewers can actually learn a thing or two about cooking and ingredients by watching. Who could say no to flinching at social awkwardness and learning to perfectly julienne carrots at the same time?
1 WataMote
Dating sims are a video game genre like any other, and there's nothing inherently cringe about wanting to play them. As this series shows, however, things do get cringey when those dating sims begin to replace the real world, which is exactly what happens to Tomoko Kuroki in WataMote.
WataMote (aka No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!) is about otaku culture, video games, and the point at which a person begins to lose themselves in video games because fictional worlds are simply safer. That description sounds serious, but the anime isn't. WataMote is gasp-for-breath funny, even if many of its funniest moments leave the viewer hiding under a blanket from all the cringe.