David Wain’s Wet Hot American Comedy
It’s possible to see David Wain’s career as a skeleton key for the past thirty years of comedy. In the nineties, he was part of the State, an eleven-member troupe that formed at N.Y.U. in 1988 and had its own antic sketch show on MTV from 1994 to 1995. With its dumb-smart, self-conscious brand of anti-comedy, the eponymous show was a Gen X answer to “Saturday Night Live”—and MTV’s attempt to bottle coolness through humor the way it had with music videos. In the two-thousands, after the State disintegrated, Wain and two other members, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, formed the trio Stella, which helped define New York’s downtown alt-comedy scene. He also directed the 2001 cult movie “Wet Hot American Summer” (co-written with Showalter), whose jam-packed ensemble included such rising stars as Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, and Elizabeth Banks. (It returns to theatres this August, for its twenty-fifth anniversary.) By 2008, riding the Hollywood comedy boom launched by Judd Apatow, Wain was directing goofy, celebrity-driven studio features such as “Role Models,” starring Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott as a pair of energy-drink salesmen forced into mentoring kids as community service. In the twenty-teens, Wain turned to Netflix, which had emerged as the latest home for offbeat humor, and made two “Wet Hot” reunion series and the film “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” about the rise and fall of “National Lampoon.”
What’s the status of comedy in Hollywood today? One sign may be that Wain’s first film in eight years, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” was made independently and premièred at Sundance, then was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics, which will release it in theatres this week. Co-written by Wain and his longtime collaborator Ken Marino (another State alum), the movie stars Zoey Deutch as Gail, a small-town Kansas sweetheart whose fiancé unexpectedly cashes in on his “celebrity sex pass”—the famous person that your partner is allowed to cheat on you with in the extremely unlikely event that they meet. Furious, Gail travels to Hollywood to pursue her own fantasy lay, Jon Hamm. Her quest closely parallels “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with a trio of new friends (including John Slattery, as a cowardly version of himself), a wicked mafiosa (Sabrina Impacciatore, of “The White Lotus”), and a hot-air balloon. Despite a starry cast, including Hamm, Jennifer Aniston, and “Weird Al” Yankovic, “Gail Daughtry” is an underdog in a Hollywood that seems to think that comedy is only meant for movie theatres when it’s a sequel or reboot (“The Naked Gun,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2”) or enacted by superheroes (“Supergirl,” “Deadpool & Wolverine”).
I was curious to talk with Wain about making original comedy in this bleak landscape. At fifty-six, he has the same nerdy deadpan familiar to State fans. Throughout his career, he’s found outlets for his absurdist sensibility, whether or not a Hollywood studio is handing him money. When short-form web series cropped up, he created and starred in “Wainy Days,” a fictional chronicle of his dating misadventures. During the pandemic, he and Marino formed a garage band that became the Middle Aged Dad Jam Band. Wain joined me from his home office in Los Angeles. “It’s not super fancy,” he admitted, adding, “I’m very grateful for it, because I have worked in much lesser places over the years. I’ve worked in rented closets and very tiny little office spaces or in my bedroom.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
There are two ways to describe what “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is about. One is, What if someone actually tried to use their celebrity sex pass? The other is a parody of “The Wizard of Oz.” Which came first?
Definitely the former. Adapting the broad strokes of “The Wizard of Oz” as a template was kind of our second step. The first was this idea of a celebrity pass and where might that go, and how might that bring us into this fun, whimsical version of Hollywood.
The whole script revolves around the pursuit of Jon Hamm. Was he always the celebrity it was going to be?
We worked on various versions of this for a long time, but once we got to the point of actually making the movie we realized that the convergence of Jon Hamm’s image in the world and also him being so incredibly funny—plus somebody we know and have worked with before [on “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp”]—and the pairing with John Slattery, who also has all those same traits, and then the way that they’re perceived as a pairing on “Mad Men.” It just felt, like, you can’t do better. So we wrote it for them and then prayed that they would like it when we sent it to them. We did not, admittedly, have a massive Plan B.
How did that work, getting them to both be in it?
I called up Jon Hamm and said, “Hey, I’m going to send you this thing. No expectation that you’ll like it, but we hope you do.” And I said the same thing to John Slattery. They both quickly were, like, Let’s do it!
It’s funny to see Jennifer Aniston in this movie—she’s someone you worked with, too, on “Wanderlust”—in part because there’s a “Friends” episode involving a celebrity sex pass and Isabella Rossellini.
I honestly didn’t remember that until you said it now.
Oh. Well, she’s dating Ross, and they make a list of five celebrities that they can sleep with, but Ross takes Isabella Rossellini off at the last minute. Then she walks into the coffee shop, and he tries to hit on her, but she’s no longer on the list.
Oh, that’s so funny. I had no idea.
Well, anyway. You said that you and Ken started with the idea of the celebrity sex pass. Do you have thoughts on those in general? Have you ever had one?
I don’t recall having one. But I don’t think any couple who does it is serious. It’s a way to have a funny conversation about what you like or don’t like. But I don’t think it’s ever actually a real thing, which is the whole point of this movie.
You seem to have a kind of dial you can turn, from heightened comedy that’s realistic, something like “Role Models”—unlikely to happen in real life, but it could—to complete fantastical absurdity, like this movie. “Wet Hot American Summer” is somewhere in between. The summer-camp characters are of this earth, but then there’s the scene where they go into town and do hard drugs out of nowhere.
You’re right, there is a dial. When making a movie for a big studio, for a wider audience, the dial is a little over to this side. “Role Models” was a project that had been in development without me, and then when we came on board—me and Ken and Paul Rudd—it was layering in our sensibility on top of a more mainstream package. I think the reason that movie worked on that scale was exactly that. We honored the conventions that we were working in, but then added a little bit of our thing, just to give it an extra edge.
What’s an example of something that you added?
The idea that they dress up at Kiss at the end. We took most everything in the movie and turned it into something that felt funny to us, and that’s always the barometer.
For something like “Gail Daughtry,” which goes more into the realm of the implausible, how do you hold on to something real, just to ground it?
The grounding is super important in any movie, regardless of that tone or not. The way we do it is two main things. There’s a plot structure that is clear and thought through. We’re very strict about one thing leading to another. All the normal things that you would think of in a plot are just as important here, if not more important, because we’re putting all these absurdist elements in. The second and even more important thing is the cast—people like Zoey Deutch, who bring in humanity. They’re finding that real connection between these friends and the real desire that she has to save her relationship, as silly as the mechanics are.
We just had a screening of “Wet Hot American Summer” in Cleveland, because it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary this year, and at the end, when Janeane Garofalo and Michael Showalter walk off together, I got a tear in my eye, because there’s something so deeply real about it that goes parallel to the silliness.
Gail Daughtry, of course, comes from Kansas. You grew up in Ohio. So you both came from the middle of the country to Hollywood, where you live now. I’m curious if that wound up as an element in this movie, what it’s like to discover Los Angeles.
A hundred per cent. And Ken Marino—we wrote it together—came from Long Island. We both came to New York City first, to go to N.Y.U. I was bewildered by the fact that I was in New York City for the entire twenty-six years I lived there. So I certainly felt that thing that Gail feels, going into this crazy land that we know from culture and movies but have never seen in person.
What about living in L.A. felt foreign to you?
I have two teen-agers, and they largely grew up here, and I’m continuously driving around Hollywood and all these places where I’m, like, “I want you to understand, we live in a place that’s not really the norm.” Like, every other person’s making a movie or connected to some celebrity. It’s an odd place. I felt that myself. I’ve been coming here for a long time, but I moved out here when my kids were little.
It’s also the rare movie that’s conspicuously shot in L.A., which doesn’t happen a lot anymore.
The idea of a small-budget, original feature-film comedy being shot here on location in L.A.—very, very rare. The crew, myself included, was overcome with gratitude every day.
One of those locations is pretty iconic: the Emerald City in your film is the Chateau Marmont. What did it take to film there?
We absolutely did not film there. In fact, when we talked early on about locations with our location manager, he was, like, “Just to park there would cost more than our budget.” So we found a ranch far away from the city that has a very similar vibe.
Well, you fooled me. Movie magic.
The best fooler, though, is that we did not shoot inside C.A.A. [Creative Artists Agency], either. We went to the lobby of C.A.A. covertly with an iPhone and filmed all the backgrounds, then shot the actors on a green screen.
That’s so punk.
The movie was very challenging to shoot in twenty-one days, so we used a lot of punk methods. I’ve got thirty years of learning how to do a lot with a little.
You and Marino have been collaborating for a very long time. What is your writing process?
We have an unusual thing that we’ve done. We did it three times, and all three times we made a movie out of it. We get together for a seven-day period, twelve hours a day, and shut off everything else. By the end of Day One, we have an idea that we’ve committed to. By the end of day two, we have an outline. The rest of the week, we write a first draft. So we emerge with something resembling a first draft of a movie.
That’s intense.
It was inspired by the fact that, when you’re shooting a movie, that’s what you do. There are twelve-hour days and you can’t be late. So we thought, Why not bring that kind of discipline to writing?
You also have the benefit of having known him since, what, 1988?
Eighty-seven. We met on the first day of college at N.Y.U. My friend who I grew up with, Craig [Wedren], was my roommate, and has become our composer for everything we’ve ever done. And we were assigned a third roommate who was someone that Ken knew from high school, so he came to visit our dorm the first day of college. We’ve been friends ever since.
How did you both wind up in the State?
I had joined this sketch-comedy troupe called Sterile Yak, which was founded by Mo Willems, who then became a big children’s-book writer. One of the guys from Sterile Yak left to start, like, a B-team J.V. squad, and that ultimately became the State, and Ken was in the State. Very soon after that, Sterile Yak sort of fell apart and then I joined the State.
There were eleven of you, eventually, ten men and one woman. Was there a philosophy of comedy that bonded you together? Did you talk about the way you wanted to do comedy, or were you just doing it?
We had a lot of long, late-night discussions about not just our theories about comedy but also about how great we were. This was when we were eighteen, nineteen. At the time, it served us well to be very cocky. We were very turned on by having just met a bunch of people that we all felt were really funny and made each other laugh. We certainly all had the things we brought into it that we liked. For me, it was Woody Allen and Steve Martin and “SCTV.” For others, it was more Monty Python. We sort of created our own little soup.
You all made decisions collectively, as a group of eleven. How on earth did you do that?
I think it’s a function of youth. If we were doing our show and production design was, like, “Should this be red or blue?” we were, like, “All right, one sec.” And eleven of us would argue about it and come up with an answer. Every single thing had to be approved by eleven people. At one point, we were, like, O.K., if seven people vote, we’ll do it. The State still exists. We went on tour a couple of years ago, and it’s an eleven-way consensus on anything that we do.
How did you handle telling people when you didn’t think their ideas were funny?
One of the things we learned and practiced early on was not to be shy about that. We were brutal with each other’s material. We all had this agreement that nobody should take it personally. I learned early on that quantity is as important as quality. Keep trying, keep doing more. If you write ten things and one is good, then you’ve written one good thing.
The State was originally called the New Group. Was changing the name one of the things that the eleven of you had to agree on unanimously?
Yes. We still have a massive list of all the names that we debated over. Froggy’s Your Man comes to mind. At one point, I wanted to call it the United States Comedy Troupe. There’s a list here of a hundred and ninety names that we talked about. [He pulls it up on his computer.] For a minute, we decided to call ourselves Medium Head Route, for some reason. Then one day I think Michael Patrick Jann saw the words “the state” in a newspaper or something, and we were, like, “That’s it.”
Once you were working with MTV, how did you deal with what the network wanted and how it differed from what you guys wanted?
Again, we had a naïve cockiness, and it was a lucky thing that MTV, at the time, was run by very young people. The top executives were in their twenties. But they were, like, “You have to do X, Y, and Z,” and we were, like, “No. Fuck you!” They bought it, in a way, because we were so cocksure. They told us that we had to take a reference to Bob Dylan out of a sketch, because [they thought] no one knows who Bob Dylan is. So we proceeded to drop the name “Bob Dylan” into every sketch. We were very self-styled rebels, in our own weird, suburban way.
Didn’t they tell you that you couldn’t make a reference to “The Catcher in the Rye,” because young people who watched MTV wouldn’t know what it was?
That was definitely the kind of thing they always did. They gave us these four things that every sketch had to be at least one of, like “pop-culture parody” or “sick and twisted” or “spoofing an MTV-specific show.” And we were just, like, No. We wanted to be more universal and timeless, more like Monty Python and less like “Mad TV.”
Were you defining yourselves against “Saturday Night Live”?
A hundred per cent. We all grew up worshipping “Saturday Night Live” and dreaming of being on it. Then, when we started working as our own group, we took on this mentality that we’ve created something even better. “Saturday Night Live” has these long sketches that never end, and they keep repeating the same premises and characters over and over again. So we wanted to go the opposite of that.
The State’s humor is an interesting mixture of extremely dumb and self-aware. I’m thinking of the “Cutlery Barn” sketch, which makes almost no sense. It’s just funny voices, a talking hamburger, and a joke about fried bumblebees. On one level, it’s nonsense. But there’s also something subversive about it even being on the show.
You’re hitting on something that makes us laugh, which is that there are times when just doing the thing is the joke. We recreated the blooper reel from “The Cannonball Run” word for word. Didn’t add anything to it. For some reason, that made me laugh so hard.
A beloved sketch for State fans is “The Restaurant Sketch.” You play a patron at a restaurant, and you’re politely ordering, but everyone around you keeps accusing you of being too loud. Then you turn to the camera and say, “Now, you see, the joke here is that everyone here is saying I’m screaming, which isn’t true. And that’s funny. Anything that isn’t true is funny. Anything that is true isn’t funny.” Then, of course, the sketch undermines that premise. But it seems like something you had thought through as a precept of comedy.
It probably just came through discussing what comedy is and taking it down to a level of simplicity that is absurd. That sketch does tickle me. It’s so silly, to try to be so reductive about what’s funny, in a way that clearly is not funny—and therefore is funny. I think a lot of what we’ve done over the years is, How unfunny can we be, in a way that is funny?
And yet there’s some truth to it. For instance, in the “Wet Hot American Summer” reunions, a linchpin of the humor is that the entire cast is now in their forties or so, and you’re insisting that they’re teen-agers.
Right. Not true! The premise of that restaurant sketch is, at its core, correct. But it’s just said in such a perfunctory way, like, [holding up an eyeglass case] “This is not an eyeglass case. It’s a banana! And therefore it’s funny to say that!”
Do you have other rules of comedy?
Yes. Especially if Ken and I are debating something, we say, “We can’t use that joke, because it’s a hat on a hat,” or “Three is good, four is too many.” But none of these are hard-and-fast rules. Often, you’re looking for ways to put words to the truth, which is “I don’t find that funny.” At the end of the day, it really is just gut.
You’ve described the ten years between “The State” being on MTV, in the mid-nineties, and “Stella” being on Comedy Central, in 2005, as a low point in your career, even though you made “Wet Hot American Summer” during that decade. What were you trying to make happen?
When the State started to fall apart, we were struggling to figure out other things to do, and they didn’t work out great. We tried to make a movie that fell apart, and we did write this book [“State by State with the State”] that didn’t really hit. We made this album that didn’t come out. Then half of the group broke off and did their own thing without me—“Viva Variety”—and at the time I and some of the others that were not included were very upset. Then we had our own thing called Stella, but up until we had that show on Comedy Central it was not anything that made me any money. Then we did make “Wet Hot American Summer,” which was great, but it was a big bomb in the theatres. So income was very sparse during those years.
Stella grew out of the Luna Lounge, on the Lower East Side, and I remember the three of you—you and Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter—were like the dapper princes of New York alt comedy. How did you figure out what Stella was?
It was very organic. We had been the ones among the State who had taken an interest in this alt-comedy scene, first at Rebar and then at the Luna Lounge. We got to see people like Marc Maron and Todd Barry and Louis C.K. and Janeane Garofalo doing something different from what we had seen on cable or at the Comedy Store. We were really turned on by that and started doing it ourselves.
We did a show at Brooklyn Polytechnic that was a disaster. It was a bunch of tech students who seemed like they were forced out of their rooms to come into this brightly lit fluorescent room with, like, chicken wings in the back, and sit in folding chairs and first watch a magician and then watch the three of us. They didn’t have any clue who we were or any interest in what we were doing. I think we bailed on the whole thing pretty early.
Aren’t you a magician, too?
I’m a magician, too, not related to this story. But, yes. Part of this alternative comedy scene was people trying out things. It was very casual, and people brought notepads onstage and were, like, “First draft!” I was, like, But where’s the second draft? Where’s the more polished version of this new kind of comedy? That’s how we ended up talking to the Fez under Time Café and saying, “We want to do this show once a week, where we’re going to dress up in coats and ties and have Martinis.” We had a house band. The woman who ran the club said, “You have to tell me the name of the show,” and we said, “We see that you’re pregnant. What’s your daughter’s name going to be?” She said, “Stella.” And we were, like, “All right, that’s the name.”
In the middle of this, how did you become a movie director?
Of the people in the State, there were two of us who had any interest in being directors. Michael Patrick Jann directed the sketches that were with a [professional] crew or shot on film or Beta. I was shooting on Hi8, running around with our own crew, pre-YouTube style. And I went to film school and made a thesis short film. In the aftermath of the State, Michael Showalter and I sat down with the intention of writing a movie that I would direct. That was the slow road to finally making “Wet Hot American Summer.”
After it didn’t do well in the theatres, what was your next move?
That was pretty low. Michael and I would fly out to L.A. and have meetings, where it was, like, “Oh, my God, we loved that movie. If it were up to me, we would make another one just like that. Obviously, we can’t.” We would get into development on a movie idea or a series that the agent set us up with, and they would be, like, “We love you guys so much. Just make sure it’s not in your voice, or anything close to it.” I remember once writing down a list of thirty-two projects that Michael and I tried to put together that fell apart. We wrote “They Came Together” during that time, because we had pitched it to Universal. It took ten years before we got that made more independently. Basically, a lot of swings and a lot of misses.
Eventually, you were making movies for Universal—“Role Models” and “Wanderlust.”
That was a real fluke. I had just made “The Ten” with Paul Rudd. And he was set up with Seann William Scott to do this studio comedy, which at the time was called “Little Big Man” or “Mentors.” The director had left under some sort of acrimony that I never fully got the full story of. But they were already in prep, and he called me and was, like, “Would you want to jump in here?” I think they were desperate, and Paul vouched for me.
What was different about making a big, star-driven comedy for Universal?
It was more similar to what I had done before than I thought it would be. I always cared about structure and storytelling. I was never making “Un Chien Andalou.” The big difference was that there were so many other cooks. The marketing department was involved from moment one. There was a much larger crew and a larger set of tools, and more time. But it was still the same process: Where should we put the camera, and how do we get the actors to the place where it’s the funniest? Maybe I was too young to know what I should be afraid of.
At a certain point, you started working with Netflix, for the “Wet Hot” reunion series, in 2015 and 2017, and “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” in 2018. Was that another adjustment?
For different reasons, I have gotten into situations where we’ve been largely left alone to make the movie we wanted to make. Going to Netflix, they didn’t give us a ton of notes. They didn’t have a lot of layers there, like they do now. We had been conceiving this “Wet Hot American Summer” prequel as a movie. But then, as we were writing it, we wanted to put a lot more into it than we had pages for in a movie script. We were looking around and were, like, Netflix is now a place where you can do something that’s a long movie in the form of a series.
Your career has spanned all these different eras, whether it’s nineties anti-comedy, bigger-budget films during the height of Apatow studio comedies, and then the Netflix era. How do you see the comedy industry in Hollywood now?
I have often just gravitated back to what I enjoy, and sometimes it’s been in favor and sometimes it hasn’t. I imagine that part of the reason I haven’t made a movie in eight years is because comedy feature films have been out of fashion. I have not been good at being a chameleon and jumping into whatever is trendy. Hopefully, in the long term, that’s a good thing.
I was just looking at what comedies have come out recently, and they’re all connected to franchises: “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the sixth “Scary Movie.” “Supergirl” probably counts, much like “Deadpool” does. The era of “Role Models,” where it’s two idiot dudes going on an adventure, doesn’t exist now, except maybe for “Friendship,” which was from A24.
“Role Models” and “Wanderlust” were both part of that rated-R-comedy Apatow era, where studios were, like, Great, one or two stars and a premise, and let’s go! I just heard Seth Rogen doing an interview about how they green-lit “Superbad” without a cast. They were, like, We like the script. Here’s a release date. That’s not anywhere close to what’s happening now. I hear some chatter that it’s going to come back, or there’s going to be a new appetite for comedies that are new and original. Who knows. All I know is I want to have a chance to do what I do in some form and make a living.
For “Gail Daughtry,” you just went out and made the movie as an indie, and it was picked up by Sony Classics. Is there anything about that that you prefer to, say, having Universal give you twenty-eight million dollars?
It’s an oddball, old-school thing that happened, where an independent movie gets picked up by a distributor at Sundance. For a comedy like this, it’s super rare. There was nobody telling us what to do, and obviously that’s very nice. That said, when we made “Role Models” and “Wanderlust,” I appreciated the notes from the studio. When you have good people giving you notes, it can make the movie better. But, for a movie like this, it is all about a certain voice being pure.
You have maintained collaborations with specific people for an incredibly long amount of time, whether it’s Michael Showalter and Ken Marino from the State or Paul Rudd, who seems to pop up in everything you do. What does that do for your process?
From as early as being in college in the State, we had this thing of all joining hands and going, “Let’s do this together forever!” A lot of people say that, and very few people actually do it. We prioritized that over other things over the years and also had the luck to be able to do that. I don’t take for granted the good fortune of getting to wake up on many days and go to work with my oldest friends. ♦