Watching Wet Hot American Summer (2001) as it returns to theaters could be a "What the hell is water?” experience for newcomers. When it first came out, this was a film with a cast and crew of nearly all unknowns (mostly alumni of the NYU improv group The State) operating on a comedic sensibility that alienated critics and failed to attract audiences, resulting in a decisive box office dud. 25 years later, many of these faces are at least familiar (Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio, H. Jon Benjamin’s voice) if not famous (Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks), and a monstrous share of contemporary humor is downstream from what David Wain, Michael Showalter, and their company devised. It’s a rare—and for longtime fans, gratifying—Xennial cultural victory.
A major factor in Wet Hot flopping in its day was its fixation on out-of-fashion cultural touchstones like ‘80s teen sex comedies and Borscht Belt humor. (The most niche reference that went completely over my head on every previous viewing but made me howl on my latest rewatch: A horny boy watching girls disrobe from afar, whispering, “It’s just like Klute!”) Taking place on the last day of a Maine Jewish summer camp in 1981, its taste in parody and absurdist jokes is as freeform as a Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker film, but with a more relaxed, less manic approach. There’s a confident looseness that fits the setting’s languid end-of-summer vibe. The multitude of different storylines sometimes makes it feel like an Altman hangout movie, albeit with a different flavor of mental derangement.
Wet Hot’s dusty road to becoming a cult hit wends through the woods of shifting entertainment paradigms. The first time I saw the film was when I caught it on Comedy Central as a teenager, the second via a DVD rental in college, and the third when it was streaming on Netflix. That last one may be most key to the movie’s penetration into broader acceptance; at the very least, the film was popular enough on Netflix that the platform’s mysterious algorithms told its executives to greenlight a prequel miniseries, First Day of Camp, in 2015, and then a sequel series, Ten Years Later, in 2017. Both shows are not without their pleasures, but they’re plagued by the all-too-common comedy cash-in problem of taking tossed-off jokes from the original and reiterating them well past their welcome.
One thing those spin-offs miss is how much Wet Hot American Summer, for all its surrealism, often draws from familiar, down-to-earth experiences of adolescence. Mark Asch’s retrospective on the film with Wain and Showalter for Letterboxd’s Journal speaks to this, as the duo explains how much of the script was inspired by their own time at summer camps. The best example is Wain recounting how the scene in which Marino’s character abandons his young charges on a river-rafting excursion to get laid, only to crash his van, was something he in fact did. (Wain does not elaborate on whether, like in the film, the crash played out as abruptly as Homer Simpson hitting a chestnut tree.) The whole ethos is summed up in Rudd’s iconic pissy cleanup routine—authentic teenage angst torqued just north of ridiculous.
Wet Hot American Summer screens August 15-19 at Alamo Drafthouse San Francisco.
