The thing with “cringe” is that it isn’t exactly new to on-screen comedic productions in the 21st century. Social awkwardness, self-unawareness, faux pas, and so on have always been staples to getting laughs out of audiences. But like “gross-out,” “slapstick,” “frat house,” and so on, “cringe comedy” became the term for the quasi-subgenre in recent decades largely thanks to Steve Carrell’s iconic character Michael Scott from NBC’s The Office. He REALLY made scenes simply agonizingly uncomfortable to sit through, his “best” moments on par with the worst in horror films.

One might wonder if at some point over the last few days that the concept crossed the mind of actor/comedian Bill Hader following his experience at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party on Saturday night. Separate reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, and the Hollywood Reporter together paint a pretty cringey picture of a 32 year-old man being dragged to the party by his parents who could not leave him home alone that night. The man, Nick Reiner, was not invited but O’Brien kindly accommodated his parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, when they asked if they could bring him. O’Brien didn’t really announce it though, and the A-listers present who noticed him were questioning whether the 6 ft 3, 320 lbs Nick had simply wandered in off the street somehow.

Then things got cringier. Nick wandered around the party, asking guests – some of whom he’d already been introduced to – their names and if they were “famous.” Yet it wasn’t cringey enough for Nick who then approached Hader as the comedian was chatting with another guest, asking him the same question. Hader then calmly told Nick that it was a private conversation he’d been interrupting, to which the deranged failson stared silently and menacingly at Hader for a cringey amount of time.

Nick then “stormed off.” Shortly thereafter the rest of the party fell silent to listen to a shouting match between Nick and Rob over the former’s disturbing behavior. The elder Reiners apologized profusely and left but the vibe of the night at O’Brien’s was ruined, according to the reporting.

And that was the last time anyone else saw Rob and Michele alive. Nick stabbed them to death at some point before 4 AM, when he was seen checking in to a hotel room in Santa Monica. Staff there later found blood all over the room’s bedsheets and shower. Rob and Michele’s bodies weren’t found until their daughter showed up at about 3:30 PM on Sunday. Nick was arrested a few hours later outside of a convenience store in the Exposition Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, about 15 miles away from the Reiners’ house in Brentwood. His three siblings now have to live with themselves every minute wondering what they could or should have done to prevent their brother from slashing their parents’ throats. Conan O’Brien and Bill Hader and the rest of them must be wracked with similar guilt thinking they could’ve just told a joke to lighten the mood, broken the awkwardness.

Maybe that would’ve changed the course of that Saturday night. Hader’s had cringey ones before:

It’s funny… in parts. Mostly wasteful of talent in that the REALLY solid impression of Daniel Plainview over a single line from There Will Be Blood is… well just very Saturday Night Live. Won’t say anything more about that… Sorry for the digression. The point is that if you squint and not very hard at all at the first part of the story here, just about the party with the awkward, menacing stare and the embarrassing, cringe-inducing interruption by an overgrown weirdo suffering from drug addiction and severe mental illness… All of it’s simply too adjacent to the gestalt of comedy productions that treat such real suffering and dysfunction as fair game for material. You can’t unsee it.

This isn’t to moralize or wag the finger at said material so much as simple observation. Not a “What’s the deal with that Reiner kid? You’re at a party and he’s standing there silently like he’s security or something except he’s one of the new guys who takes the job way too seriously. You don’t know whether to tip him or bend over so he can conduct the cavity search!” sort of observation.

Just an observation. The overlap of comedy and tragedy, both diegetic and literal.