Wild, ft. Leslie Knope

Wet Hot American Summer simply can't be the only good movie about camp

I’ve always loved to camp. Actually, I’ve always loved anything in the outdoors. I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia, in a town called South Hill, population 3k. My mom used to throw my brother and me outside at breakfast each day and only call us back for lunch and dinner. We’d romp through the woods with walkie talkies, crossing babbling little brooks and building forts in the woods. As I got older, my dad and I went to father / daughter campouts organized by the Y. For two weekends a year, we would head to a remote state park near my house, a bunch of my friends and their dads in tow. I learned to love s’mores, shoot a bow and arrow, and pitch a tent.

In college, I spent each summer living in the Sierra Nevada, working at a family camp run by the Cal Alumni Association (if any of my friends still read this, they’re groaning right now. I may have already lost them). I’ve written about it a few times before, and it is, without a doubt, my favorite place in the whole world. We slept under the stars each night and put on 3x weekly variety shows and hosted staff parties after the adults went to bed. It was the epitome of work hard / play hard. I’d wake up at 7 for a breakfast shift, organize a game of preteen volleyball at 9:30, run back down to serve lunch at 11:30, lifeguard at the pool for 2 hours, sprint back to my bed to squeeze in a 30 minute nap, work another pool shift, serve dinner, and put on a variety show till 9. And then once the parents took them and their kids to bed, we’d build elaborate parties of whatever the hell was lying around, with stations and a unifying theme and costumes assigned to all 150 staff members. We’d drink till 2 and then wake up and do it all over again the next day.

Camp was easily the most formative part of my identity. Being in the outdoors like that, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, seeing shooting stars every single night, absolutely shaped who I am. So I get kinda giddy seeing representations of camp or camping in media.

Parks and Rec’s camping episode in season 3 isn’t exactly summer camp, but bear with me — it’s still camping. So I’m going to draw my potentially tenuous little link here and we’re going to have a blast while I do it.

Leslie, fresh off the heels of crushing the Harvest Festival, must come up with her next Big Idea for the Parks department. Everyone’s eyes are on her. But? for the first time in her life … she’s fresh out.

For a change of scenery, she takes the whole Parks department on an overnight camping trip. This whole group would compete hard for the “least adapted to the woods” award. Tom buys several thousands of dollars worth of “camping gear” (TV, roomba, snowcone machine - the essentials). Jerry and Ron go fly fishing, where Jerry wonders if he should host a teen abstinence workshop (Ron says “that might actually work”). Andy tries to surprise April with a really sweet lovebirds’ tent, but doesn’t double check her location so ends up several miles away. Chris shows up out of nowhere, Ann forces him to have a very cringey talk where she tries to kiss him again, and she basically gets dumped AGAIN.

The whole gang, losing steam on coming up with a new brilliant idea and disheartened that Leslie doesn’t have one, decides to relocate to a bed and breakfast called The Quiet Corn, run by an ancient woman (or potentially a ghost haunting the property) named Elsa Klack. I love this bitch. The Quiet Corn serves breakfast at 5:30 am, is home to 100+ cats, and has a terrifying collection of dolls. It is one of my favorite single-ep locations in all of P&R. I’m positive if I were to stay there I wouldn’t sleep a wink.

Growing up camping and later working at camp, I’ve always found myself loving books, shows, and movies about camp in any capacity. I used to be OBSESSED with Jen Calonita’s YA novel, Sleepaway Girls. There’s the Parent Trap, of course, and Camp Rock, and that one season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel where she goes to the Catskills. Even Percy Jackson!

But no movie depicts camp like Wet Hot American Summer.

Wet Hot American Summer is an insane movie, and if you’ve never seen it, all you need to know going into it is that it’s basically one giant clusterfuck. It’s the last day of camp, so the staff is “each trying to complete their unfinished business before the day ends. The entire summer of pent-up sexual frustrations, unresolved post-traumatic stress, pending separations and of course, the talent show, all weigh heavily on the minds and groins of counselors and campers alike” (according to Wikipedia). There’s an insane rafting trip plot-line, there’s a talent show, there’s a day-off sequence that I love. It has an absolute star-studded cast of comedians before they were famous. Like, hi baby Amy Poehler!!!! There’s also Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd, Joe Lo Truglio, Janeane Garofolo, Molly Shannon, Bradley Cooper, Michael Ian Black. Jump scare every two seconds.

Despite its clusterfuckness, I very firmly believe that Wet Hot American Summer is the best comedy about camp ever made. We’ve seen nothing at all like it, that tries to capture the absurdity of what it’s like living in a bubble all summer where the real life consequences of your actions don’t exist. You can kiss whomever you want, do whatever crazy shit you want to do on your day off, and you come back to camp the next day light as a little feather. Ready to do it at all again. And it’s all done basically in the middle of nowhere, where everyone’s grimy and sleeping in the dirt (without Tom’s bougie tent to save them).

The key is that it focuses on the staff. It shows us the raunchy, uninhibitedness of adults. I love twin baby Lindsey Lohans as much as the next person and firmly believe that The Parent Trap is one of the best movies ever made, BUT watching little nuggets duke it out in cabin wars doesn’t make for objectively great comedy. It’s heartwarming and nostalgic … but I’m not laughing out loud every five minutes because the jokes are good. Wet Hot, on the other hand, touches on the kids so little I couldn’t bring up a single one of them in my mind, gun to my head.

The only problem with Wet Hot is that it’s essentially an n of 1. And it was made 24 years ago. AND it was set in 1981. There’s not a cell phone in sight, which makes it cool and gritty and gives us an excuse to see Paul Rudd in jorts, BUT it’s hard to map onto camp life today. It’s a relic.

So here’s the hill I’ll die on: we need more comedies about camp!!! We need some fresh blood!!

I want the Booksmart of summer camp, a big-budget comedy with a star-studded cast of people who are actually young adults in real life. No, Theater Camp doesn’t count (even though it has Molly Gordon). I want a Sex Lives of College Girls-style sitcom that tracks counselors through their love triangles and various sexual identity realizations and raunchy days off. Lowkey, even imagine a comedy about a youth Christian camp, and there’s one counselor who didn’t know what he was signing up for, and now has to sit through three hours of chapel and this shit all day.

There are all different types of camp to explore: sleepaway, family, Jewish summer camp, Christian summer camp, band camp. It’s such an insanely ripe environment for comedy, and I really can’t believe how much we’re lacking in the representation of it right now. The best we can get is a camping episode of Parks and Rec (even though it’s perfect). If camp itself requires too much research or world building or what have you, let’s have more comedies about camping trips gone awry that DON’T end as slasher films. The great outdoors just does something to people, whether it’s for a summer or a weekend. And I want more of it!!