2 surprisingly-earnest-satires out of 4
It’s 1981 at Camp Firewood, and campers and counselors alike are preparing for the last day of camp. For the campers, this means one last day to frolic in the sun, swim in the cool lake, and eat awful camp food. For the counselors, this means one last day to jump into the sheets for a final post-pubescent romp. Wain’s film makes no attempt to hide its intentions. Every counselor in this universe is obsessed with getting laid, to the point that some characters quite literally leave a canoe full of children dangling over the precipice of oblivion to find comfort in the arms of a lover.
It’s remarkably silly, and one reading of the film suggests that the jokes fall flat because they are innately unfunny. Another interpretation, however, suggests that Wain and Showalter wrote the film as an unfunny homage to the sex comedies of the era. That is to say, the movie is “supposed” to be unfunny on purpose, because it’s skewering a genre that was never funny to begin with. Certainly, the film’s National Lampoon-styled, over-the-top, cartoony posters seem to suggest that the film recognizes that, by design, its humour is supposed to fail. In this case, take my words with a grain of salt: Wet Hot American Summer is not funny, but I strongly suggest throwing away 97 minutes of your life anyway.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]…an earnest attempt to portraying ridiculous comedy.[/pullquote]
I’ve yet to see a more earnest film than
In short, this is absurdist comedy played straight, and the viewer who enters this film knowing that they are throwing away 97 precious minutes of their life will be rewarded both for their tenacity and their sacrifice. Earlier I said that this film provided its audience with a snapshot of the not-so-distant past. This is not to say that this film is an even remotely accurate portrayal of the glory-filled nostalgia of the ‘80s and ‘90s. I honestly don’t believe that the ‘80s even existed, because the joy, emotion, and forlorn hope expressed by artists of the decade stand in almost abject opposition to the hate-fueled comedy of the early aughts and the early to mid-aughteens.
We live in a difficult world, perhaps more than any other time in recent memory, and our comedy has grown to reflect this. No longer satisfied with the middling comedies of the past, today’s comedies are either dramas with comic voices, or mean-spirited features that venerate decadence and misbehaviour. There is hope, of course, because comic-dramas are becoming less rare, and though studios still pump out films about unscrupulous adult-children, writers are insistent on injecting their stories with more than a little heart.
However, today’s parodies suffer in the same vein as the recent seasons of SNL—each joke is presented with a smug, “Isn’t this all so drole” attitude. Parodies, almost by definition, don’t need to make a show of the subjects they skewer. Playing a joke straight—allowing a subject’s innate absurdity to reveal itself naturally—is the key to successful parody. We know to laugh at parody because we are shown how the natural ridiculousness of our world.
Wet Hot American Summer recognizes that there is nothing funny about pointing at and mocking a bunch of horny kids, so it doesn’t. Instead, it shows them acting in increasingly preposterous ways, discretely hanging a lampshade in order to continue suspending its audience’s disbelief. The trick, however, is that Wet Hot American Summer draws our attention to the absurd, increases the absurdity just for a moment, and then returns to its central story without ever addressing the fact that these kids are doing heroin in a nearby town, and there’s no way they’re going to be okay enough to go canoeing an hour later.
They don’t make movies like this anymore—and we’re almost better as a species because they don’t make movies like this anymore—but it’s always nice to look back and think, “Man, I’m really glad we got better at being funny.”