It could be watching a shitty band that are under the delusion they are great. Or having someone at your table torturing everyone with boring stories and stale jokes and being oblivious that everyone’s eyeballs are mentally rolling into the back of their head.
What made me think of this was that I listened to an interview of Richard Dawkins meeting with this fundamentalist christian woman. They were discussing evolution and I had a hard time listening to the whole thing. Her answers and rebuttals were so ignorant and yet she was so sure of herself that I was embarrassed for her to the point of physical discomfort.
The young ’uns call it “cringe” (or did, three years ago):
To cusper Sydne, 27, a freelance designer, cringe means anything that’s humiliating. “Cringe is the feeling of second-hand embarrassment for something that someone else is posting or doing or saying,” she says. “It’s almost like a gagging feeling mixed with pity — ‘yikes…’ is a good way to describe it,” she says.
Secondhand embarrassment for me. Cringe is a little harder to pin down but I think a cluelessness element is baked in. Like a lot of cringy humor in The Office or Arrested Development are characters being confidently wrong or inappropriate. “I’m afraid I just blew myself.”
Facepalm is simply “I can’t believe this shit” exasperation.
“Cringe” pretty well means what you are looking for. When I feel embarrassment for someone else, like on The Office or another show, I literally cringe: It’s the perfect description.
German has a dedicated verb for exactly that: Fremdschämen. It’s a compound that literally means being ashamed for someone else and is quite a popular word nowadays in the social media subculture.