If the 2020s have been the decade of horror, there are signs the 2030s may usher in a new era in American comedy. The genre vanished from theaters a couple of years before the pandemic, stymied largely by the reaction to Donald Trump winning the presidency, along with Trump himself. The man’s so consistently and enduringly amusing to millions of people that he put professional comedians into a stun-lock from which they have yet to escape; comics known for blue and bizarre humor retreated and overcompensated for it and succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome, unable to face the fact that a) Trump shared their sense of humor, and b) he was funnier, more in touch, more on top of things. When the President of the United States has a natural gift for expanding the lexicon—“many such cases,” “Sad!,” “a very stable genius,” “I’ve never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”—what’s a comic supposed to do? Tweet all day, just like him. But don’t be funny. Be bitchy, be petty, be mean, be cruel, be vindictive, violent, insane. BUT DON’T BE FUNNY!
Michael Ian Black took his new job seriously. He was better than Trump, and he was sorry for all those things he said on I Love the 80s, Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, and Twitter. Outshined by the President and implicitly rejected by the media for “perpetuating” any number of -isms, comics like Black, David Cross, Rainn Wilson, Kathy Griffin, Bill Burr, Bill Hader, and Seth Rogen focused on parroting what the news told them to say rather than keeping comedy in movie theaters. There are still plenty of multi-camera sitcoms and a few streaming service comedies, but by the time this decade is done, you’ll be hard pressed to name even five comedies that will stand the test of time, if they haven’t been forgotten already.
The 2000s were a golden era in American comedy, in film and on television, and David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer is one of those enduring classics. Released to little fanfare in the summer of 2001, Wet Hot American Summer quickly became a cult movie and gradually grew in popularity as Wain, Black, and Michael Showalter continued working steadily in television, either as themselves on clip shows like I Love the 80s or as the suited members of Stella, a trio that briefly had their own show on Comedy Central in 2005. Wain returned to theatrical cinema in 2008 with Role Models, a decent hit starring Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott, in one of his last major roles. Next came Wanderlust, one of the few memorable comedies of the early-2010s, and then They Came Together in 2014, a very out there romcom spoof starring Rudd and Amy Poehler, along with a whole batch of regulars you probably recognize from The State, Reno 911!, Stella, or Wet Hot American Summer. And then? A Futile and Stupid Gesture, in 2018, for Netflix; I never saw the Doug Kenney biopic, and it disappeared into the ether just like everything else on Netflix.
Eight years later, he’s back with Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, an absurdist ensemble comedy starring Zoey Deutch, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ben Wang, John Slattery, and co-writer/director Ken Marino (he was the guy in Wet Hot American Summer who talked a big game but was in fact a virgin); friendly cameos include Elizabeth Banks, Richard Kind, Henry Winkler, “Weird” Al Yankovic, Penn Jillette, Elizabeth Perkins, Paul Rudd, and Jennifer Aniston. Deutch plays Daughtry, a hairdresser two weeks away from her wedding. Daughtry and her fiancé go to an Aniston book signing, and on the way in, they joke about having a “celebrity sex pass”—hers is Jon Hamm, his is Aniston. They play, but he takes it literally, and Daughtry’s fiancé is plugging away at Aniston in the back of the book store within an hour. Unacceptable! She goes to Hollywood with her gay best friend to find Jon Hamm and fuck him.
Not a bad set-up for a comedy. There are a few moments here, jokes that recall the glorious nonsense of Wet Hot American Summer, but let’s be honest, it’s slim pickings. Time waits for no one, and Wain has either filmed a first draft or devolved into a parody not only of himself but of his entire generation. Wain and Marino deflate their own movie by resorting to the easiest, most tired kind of comic over-explanation that was already wearing out its welcome during the Bush Administration. Besides taking the “celebrity sex pass” literally, characters are constantly comically clarifying and hyperextending everything they say. This is obviously meant to be funny, but it never is; they’re placeholders for jokes that went unwritten. The anarchic absurdism of Wet Hot American Summer remains seamless, whereas this movie is like watching a tailor get undressed. Many such cases in “Hollyweird,” as Michael Ian Black calls it in a cameo as a hawker of maps to the stars.
Other State familiars include Kerri Kenney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, Toby Huss, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, and Kevin Allison. Wain himself shows up as the editor of People in a blown-out teal tinted 2007 flashback, which is really the only funny thing in the movie. The rest is simply amusing.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a movie you can sit and watch, which might sound like a backhanded compliment, but you never know: I nearly walked out of The Invite, a movie so full of itself with absolutely nothing new to say or do. Gail Daughtry doesn’t even rank among Wain’s own comedies, let alone the few 2020s comedies that will last (Bottoms… Bottoms… Christ, is Bottoms really the only one so far?) But it’s a comedy you can sit and watch for 94 minutes on a hot summer day, when everyone else is busy lining up for The Odyssey or rearranging their Congressional death pool. Again, that may sound like faint praise, but these are desperate times for film comedy, and I can only hope that they’ll be over soon.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM