Cringe Escapes The Fringe

Other Cringe devotees are more satisfied that the concept can hold its own. “I think the voyeuristic attraction will translate,” says Harris Danow, a law student who’s read multiple entries from his Luke-and-Vader-collaged composition book. “People will be on their couch cringing. And whether it’s on TV or not, there will still be forums like Freddy’s—it will spread to other cities.” Brown says that if Cringe does become a television series, it will be filmed at venues in different cities that have a “Freddy’s feel,” although the pilot itself was filmed at Crash Mansion, a larger, upscale club in Manhattan. “I was concerned at first that it would lose something, become cheesy, but after seeing the pilot, I’m more confident that it can [maintain] the same tone,” she says. “Either way, I’m going to keep the live reading at Freddy’s as long as it’s open.”

Brown’s book will also offer a different view of Cringe than the one from Freddy’s backroom. It will be scan- and design-heavy, with the handwriting and doodles of contributors, as well as dated photos and current interviews. “Some of the fun of the book will be the voyeuristic thrill of reading someone’s diary,” she says, adding that the book will include material from a much wider demographic than the typical Cringe crowd in Brooklyn. “For me the most fun will always be in the live readings, but with the book, you’ll find something different every time you read it.”

In any form, the material speaks for itself as a matchless source of unintentional irony, like this sixth-grade entry from frequent reader Maggie Jacobstein: “Amber wrote me a letter, and her father abuses her and her mother. I am so scared for both of them. Kerri didn’t get me a present from Mexico, and she got all her other friends one. Today hasn’t been a good day, on all points.”

“Honestly, it’s brilliant satire, it just happens to be real,” says Aaron McQuade, a 30-year-old musician who shares his early, (i.e. awful), songwriting at Cringe (sample lyric: “I keep frustration in a bottle, I keep confusion in a jar, it’s 10 o’clock... do you know where your emotions are?”). John Oliver also says that holding one’s self up to public ridicule like Cringe is “the purest form of clowning.” “I never kept a diary, but like most comedians I often prostitute stories from my childhood to make strangers laugh, although I usually embellish them,” he says. “[But] one of the things I loved about Cringe Night was that they didn’t.” Brown agrees that the unedited, unrehearsed storytelling is what sets Cringe apart from other shows that exploit adolescent absurdity.

“It’s incredibly sad, really, looking back on these things you wanted so badly,” says Brown. “Most of them didn’t happen, or didn’t happen the way you wanted, because you didn’t have the experience in life to know they wouldn’t. But it’s also hilarious.”

Indeed. “I was reading Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries and stopped,” wrote Danow in late 1994 about the book that inspired him to start a diary. “I didn’t have time. I don’t have time for anything anymore. Kurt’s gone. I miss him.”