The essence of cringe comedy seems to be characters governed by their shadow. It’s not repressed and glimpsed under stress via projection behaviors. It’s in charge and directing behavior largely unregulated.
A good example of it is the title character in The Mick played by Caitlin Olson, and seems to be an extension of the one she played in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Dee.
Mick always blurts out what she’s thinking, jumps to conclusions, is short-sighted etc etc. But not in a clueless or id-driven way. And lacking the dark nobility to be antiheroic. Antiheroes and antiheroines aren’t cringe.
She is portrayed as smart but as pulling consequentially stupid jackass moves that female characters don’t generally do, due to being ungoverned.
Women are rarely written as geniuses but rarely written as jackasses (jennyasses?) either. The harmless ditzy type is more common.
argument from 2017 that ‘maladjusted party girl’ is the right mental model for antiheroine. Maladjusted party girl types have a sort of tragic quality to them that the cringe jackass-heroine lacks. But there’s some relationship. Comic antiheroine?