‘There was a certain hostility’: how Wet Hot American Summer went from miss to hit

In the summer of 2001, the film critic Roger Ebert wrote a scathing film review in song form, with lyrics set to the tune of a classic song about summer camp. The review proceeded to mock the film Wet Hot American Summer in rhyme. Twenty-five years later, the film’s director and co-writer, David Wain, joined several of its stars on the vast lawn of the Autry Museum in Los Angeles to sing the review to a crowd of thousands, many of them wearing Camp Firewood T-shirts and 80s-style sweat absorbers.

The performance preceded an anniversary screening of what has become a cult classic. Ebert was one of many critics at the time who seemed baffled by the comedy, which follows the absurd adventures of a group of horny and/or lovelorn counselors desperate to make the most of their final day of camp in 1981. But if those early critics didn’t quite get it, plenty of viewers later did – enough to warrant two Netflix series, a place on various lists of the best films of the century, and a return to theaters this month to mark its 25th anniversary.

What changed over the years? Fans who discovered the movie in the ensuing years felt like “‘this is my thing. You need to know about it,’” Wain says.

It’s not a satire or a coming-of-age film or a straight camp-movie parody, though it does play on tropes like the training montage and the “anonymously evil” kids at a rival camp. But mostly, the camp serves as a setting that lends itself to an extremely high joke rate. Early critics might have gone in “with a certain expectation of what a comedy is supposed to be” and ended up unsure what to make of the movie, Wain says.

Sometimes “the joke is that it’s so unfunny, or that there’s not a joke”. And much of the humor plumbs the depths of ridiculousness in a way that might have left early viewers dumbfounded – like when a group of nerds saves the camp from falling space junk, or when the counselors plan a reunion for 10 years in the future but can’t decide whether to meet at 9am or 9.30. Wain describes the humor as “joyfully nihilistic”.

The jokes warp the boundaries of reality, but they work because they never lose touch with it. What was it like to be that age in real life? And then draping all of these spoofy things around that,” Wain says.