Wet Hot American Summer Knows Teen Comedies And Hillarious Absurdist Comedy Super Well

So, this past weekend I watched Wet Hot American Summer for the first time.

I cannot tell you my thoughts on the movie right here and right now.

However, if you meet me back here at this picnic table in 10 seconds, I'll tell you everything.

(Ten seconds pass)

OK, so...



The 21st century has been kind to many movie genres. Spoof movies are not one of them. In the last 17 years, Scary Movie sequels, two A Haunted House movies and (shudder) Fifty Shades of Black, not to mention the works of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, have all combined to ensure that the spoof movie genre has fallen down greatly from its halcyon days in the late part of the 20th century. For my money, there have really been only two entries in the spoof movie genre in this century thus far (that I've seen); Edgar Wright's 2007 effort Hot Fuzz and the 2000 David Wain cult phenomenon Wet Hot American Summer.

The latter movie begins on the last day of camp and proceeds to follow a variety of counselors and employees at the camp and all of the various antics they get into on the last day of camp. For instance, a local hunk, Victor (Ken Marino), who prides himself on being a ladies man, is trying to lose his V-card before summer lets out, Coop (Michael Showalter) is grappling with his feelings for Katie (Maguerite Moreau), Susie (Amy Poehler) and Ben (Bradley Cooper) are trying to put together a satisfactory musical number for the camp's talent show, camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) is dealing with a romantic infatuation with local intellectual Professor Henry Newman (David Hyde Pierce) and bad boy Andy (Paul Rudd) is hornier than a pack of triceratops.

The target of Wet Hot American Summer's spoofery? Wikipedia explicitly says it's more aiming to be a parody of 80's sex comedies but, perhaps because of my unfamiliarity with that subset of cinema, I personally took it as an explicit parody of another staple of 1980's movies; Hich School comedies like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or other teen-based movies from this era like Dirty Dancing. All the trademarks (taking place over the course of one day, the montages, the stock characters found in such movies, themes of acceptance) are there from that subgenre and in that respect, David Wain and company have concocted a brilliant pastiche of that subgenre.

Their real stroke of brilliance here is making a comedy entirely centered on absurdist comedy that's parodying movies with extremely heightened characters that were always played in a straightforward manner. Paul is an exaggerated caricature of the "bad boy" archetype, for sure, but is he really all that far removed from characters like Bender in his actions? I could easily see any of Paul's actions here in Wet Hot American Summer being used in The Breakfast Club in a more serious manner to show how "bad-ass" Bender or Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing is. Wet Hot American Summer realizes just how insane those 80's High School comedies were and all you have to do to turn such features into a crackerjack absurdism-driven comedy is to execute situations, character and plot elements that were staples of these movies in a more overtly humorous manner.

David Wain seems to be super well-versed in the various genres he's spoofing, to the point that the two extended parodies of 80's movie montages (an element of those films that I'll always cackle at seeing lampooned, it's such a delightful element in those movies that is primed and ready for parody) manage to even get the type of camera angles these montages would use to generate laughs in addition to satirizing more broad elements of such a trope. In addition to knowing teen-based comedies and movies from the 1980's so well, Wet Hot American Summer creates plenty of memorable stylized gags that are entirely separated from that specific subgenre, namely a sentient can of vegetables voiced by H. Jon Benjamin that offers advice to Christopher Meloni's cook character.

If you haven't seen this movie before, that prior sentence likely read as gibberish to you. For those who have seen Wet Hot American Summer, I'm sure you're like me and already chuckling at recollecting such a bizarre and hilarious moment from the film. Sure, a few of the gags fall flat in here (when you're tossing out so many jokes to the audience, how could you not have a few clunkers?), but those are most certainly the rare exception and not the rule in Wet Hot American Summer, a super inventive comedy that mixes together a unique flavor of comedy and an impressive amount of knowledge of the movies to make something that's still enduring in people's minds and vocabulary sixteen years after its barely-existent theatrical run.