Wet Hot American Summer

As a parody of late 1970's and early 80's low-brow teen comedies Wet Hot American Summer is often crudely juvenile and sometimes lame. Given its spirit however this doesn’t require apology – the no-fail idea is that it’s either  funny because its funny or funny because it’s not. Over-arching the icky post-pubescent  humour of its straightforward sources, however, is the much darker comedic sensibility of the new millennium. The result is a kind of time warp movie that appeals more for its absurdist, out-of-kilter sensibility (a trip into town turns into a full-on drug binge; the sexually-disoriented Vietnam vet camp cook finds himself through the intervention of a talking can of vegetables, and so on), more than its comedy chops per se.  

Set on the last day of summer camp in 1981 Wet Hot American Summer has an ensemble cast that includes Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper in his first big screen role and co-writer Michael Showalter, all kitted out in the form-hugging garb and terrible hair styles of the period.  Garofalo plays the desperate and dateless camp director who falls for a über-geeky astrophysicist (David Hyde Pierce) living close by  whilst all around her similarly disposed staff are more interested in getting it off with each other than in looking after their charges. One of the oddities of the film is that despite the presence of children the humour is so persistently adult, a divide bridged in a plot thread involving a love-lorn counsellor (Molly Shannon) and one of the pre-teen children.

Showalter and co-writer-director David Wain cut their comedic teeth on ''The State'', a mid-90's MTV sketch show and reflecting this the film is really a series of running-and-or-standing-still gags linked by inter-titles giving the time-of-day and a soundtrack of cock-rock style tunes of the time. At a minimum one can say that Wet Hot American Summer is noticeably different from run-of-the-mill mainstream American comedies. How much of this is a good thing will come down to individual taste but it will help to be bent.

 

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