In Which Ladel Ourselves Wet Fan Service

God & Jon Hamm

by ELEANOR MORROW

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
creators Michael Showalter & David Wain

It was right before Christmas in the year of our lord 1993 that The State debuted on MTV. Sketch comedy was previously the province of the old; Steve Martin was already in his late 60s by this time, and dating women a mere forty years younger. People still thought Eddie Murphy was hilarious. Non-Seinfeld based comedy as we know it was largely based around puns and the crankiness of Tim Allen's fictional wife Jill (Patricia Richardson). No one was sure what exactly was funny, or why. For some reason, people even found Chevy Chase amusing, or pretended to.

There was nothing to laugh at before The State came on the scene, and Wet Hot American Summer was basically a reunion show for the sketch comedy series that influenced so many young people of every profession. Did it matter that Ken Marino was now in his early forties and that apparently no one liked Kevin Allison enough to invite him back for this project? No. All that mattered is that we could laugh again.

The State's breadth was stunning, and its innovation fantastic — even its worst sketches were so mind-numbingly bizarre that they became even more humorous in retrospect thinking of the idea that MTV allowed them to air on cable television. Most older comedy shows just sit like lumps; quickly becoming dated because of a topical humor that is only understood in context. The State was nothing like that — those of its concepts which did not resonate at the time are now retrospectively funny twenty years later.

The one thing The State constantly avoided being was fan-service. Instead the half-hour show delivered what you did not expect, usually without incorporating profanity or lame cameos from more famous performers as surprises. The fact that it did not have to appeal to any extant audience is what allowed it to exist on its own terms. Well, all of that is flushed down the toilet with Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.

The original cast of the film looks surprisingly spry in this short Netflix series, with even David Hyde Pierce seeming like he has been in cryogenic sleep since Frasier. Only Showalter himself looks meaningfully different from his original character. I was watching First Day of Camp with a friend of mine whose idea of comedy is Sam Waterson playing gay, and she asked me to explain what the joke was here. "So they were old too old to play campers? And now they're still too old?" I nodded and focused my eyes on the tiny tee-shirt worn by Gerald "Coop" Cooperberg (Michael Showalter).

One of the most embarrassing things Roger Ebert ever wrote was his review of the original movie. None of the jokes resonated for him at all, probably because he was a generation older than any of the writers or performers in the film. He should have at least appreciated the lush, colorful aesthetic that David Wain has made his signature style. No one does a better closeup in this industry, and the broad array of talent is so wonderfully directed that even Chris Pine comes off as a magnificent performer.

First Day of Camp is a prequel to the original film. Coop has arrived to meet up with his girlfriend Donna (Lake Bell), who seems more interested in visiting Israeli counselor Yaron (David Wain). A camp production of the musical ElectroCity pairs theater counselor Susie (Amy Poehler) and dessicating Broadway character actor Claude (John Slattery). A subplot involving the government dumping chemical waste near the camp allows camp directors Greg (Jason Schwartzman) and Beth (Janeane Garofalo) a romantic interlude and explains how Jonas (Christopher Meloni) became Gene, the disturbed camp cook of the original film. Lastly, reporter Lindsay (Elizabeth Banks) goes undercover as a counselor to get a story about reclusive musician Eric (Chris Pine).

What exactly is First Day of Camp missing? It is almost completely composed of fan service, but that is not really the problem. Opening up the universe to amusing scenes filmed in New York in the office of magazine editor Alan (Jordan Peele) adds something different to the experience, even if characters like John Slattery's lecherous veteran actor, Jon Hamm's government assassin The Falcon and Michaela Watkins' lecherous choreographer fall a bit flat.

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp is such great fun it seems silly to ask for anything more. But extended scenes set at David Hyde Pierce's university or the courtroom of attorney Jim Stansel (Michael Cera) remind us of how exciting it would be to see a new comedy set in this wild universe instead of the familiar summer camp drama.

Demanding our most serious comedic talents revisit the scenes of their finest successes led to Beverly Hills Cop 3. Sure, without the comfort of the characters that proved so successful in the original film, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp would be an inconsistent mix of brilliant satire and completely bizarre flops (still not sure what Showalter was going for with his performance as Ronald Reagan), but that was pretty much The State. At least it wasn't content to trod out the same characters again and again, looking to resurrect whatever bit of genius captured the imagination the first time. Instead they moved onto the next thing.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York.

"You're Mine (The Chase)" - Meiko (mp3)

"Oh My Soul" - Meiko (mp3)

In Which Her Parents Constituted The Final Straw

Paying My Dues for the Journey

by ELEANOR MORROW

They Came Together
dir. David Wain
83 minutes

Joel (Paul Rudd) is an executive at Candy Systems Incorporated, a multi-ventured candy conglomerate. He is in a long-term relationship with a brunette named Tiffany (Cobie Smulders) who struggles to return his affection because of certain depraved incidents in her past.

On the day that Joel plans to propose to Tiffany, he finds her apartment spackled with torn off clothes and accessories on the hardwood floor. He calls out her name and hears sounds in the bedroom. Assuming she is just washing herself noisily in the shower, he attempts an elongated speech to preface his marriage proposal. When he turns around he sees her in the arms of Trevor (Michael Ian Black). His relationship is over.

With this inauspicious beginning commences David Wain's supreme masterpiece, They Came Together. Previously known for tackling lighter topics like the innocent thrills of summer camps or couples retreats, They Came Together marks a departure for Wain. The film is riotously funny, but it is also deeply personal.

On the surface, They Came Together presents like a zany parody of You've Got Mail. Joel's new love interest is Molly (Amy Poehler). Watching Molly swish through her delightful homespun candy shop named Upper Sweet Side makes you realize how much the showrunners on Parks and Recreation dressed and made her up so as not to overshadow Rashida Jones or Aubrey Plaza.

In They Came Together, Poehler's Molly is the utter embodiment of womanhood. Mother of a nine year old son, she meets Joel at a Halloween party where both attend dressed as Ben Franklin.

Joel and Molly don't click at first, but eventually the two New Yorkers discover they share a rare hobby: they like fiction books. "It's the feeling of being transported to another place and time," Molly says at one point. Just as quickly as their romance takes off, Joel has second thoughts when he discovers that Molly's parents are white supremacists. (Did you know that over 30 percent of whites in America believe in white supremacy, and of those 30 percent, over 95 percent of white supremacists are regular viewers of Person of Interest?)

Molly and Joel try to make their relationships with other people work after that. Joel gets back together with Tiffany, who is honest enough to inform him that he should be very suspicious of her motives, and Molly finally accepts the advances of her accountant admirer Eggbert (Ed Helms). He does not particularly share her love of fiction ("I only like to read about things that actually happened," he explains over a burrito) but he does seem pretty devoted to her, even complimenting her on how she plays Charades.

Where They Came Together really shines in its exploration of how Jewish men adapt to dating non-Jewish women. Joel's parents were killed in a tragic accident, and he has had to provide for his younger brother  Jake (Max Greenfield) who now works as a cab driver. His knowledge of the financial reality of the candy industry is the complete opposite of Molly's homespun ways — in her shop, candy is free for all children and dogs.

When Joel's company attempts to put Molly's tiny candy shop out of business, we realize how insane it was in You've Got Mail that Meg Ryan blamed her low sales on bookstore chains that are now themselves filing for bankruptcy. No one has ever properly explained to me why wasting paper is somehow morally superior to reading something on your phone, and I doubt they ever will.

Unlike the out-of-date pieces of shit They Came Together pays tribute to, there is no happy ending here. Molly discovers she has an affinity for prescription painkillers, and the coffee shop that Joel tries to open on the Upper West Side flops within a week. Meaningfully, there is no overly familiar scene where Joel and Molly have sex — it wasn't really about that. It was about the candy, and how you really should not give it away for free.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She last wrote in these pages about Masters of Sex. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Not Mine to Love" - Slow Club (mp3)

"The Pieces" - Slow Club (mp3) 

In Which We Gather Our Angels and Diablos

Things Have Changed

by DICK CHENEY

Arrested Development
creator Mitchell Hurwitz

A lot of the time I secretly believe my wife Lynne does not actually know if something is funny, and that she only laughs because she presumes it humors others or reminds her of something genuinely funny. Last night in a moody fit of rage reminiscent of how I first binged on Oreos and pork rinds at the age of seven, I viewed the entire Netflix-exclusive season of Mitchell Hurwitz's Arrested Development. The first thing my wife said was, "Isn't Ron Howard embarrassed to go on television looking like that?" and the second thing she said was, "You actually find this type of humor appealing?"

you know what this show needed? More of a ginger who can't act

I responded only with a flip remark, as has always been my metier, telling her, "You're ruining this for me." Some people only want to relive experiences they had in the past; others are comfortable in an uncertain future. For obvious reasons none of the members of the Bluth family were able to shoot any scenes together. (Except for Will Arnett because he's being blackballed by the rest of the industry for cheating on Amy Poehler.)

The clear decision should have been: we cannot have a show if people only interact with their friends and family on the phone, right? Let's forget a new season and focus on distributing our old episodes in Korea, where the kid who played Annyong Bluth can become the superstar he was destined to be.

they should have gotten the telephone industry to fund this

When I really think of what the jokes in Arrested Development are about, I start to sympathize with Lynne. After all, she does not complain when I jerk off and rewatch Millennium, all the while dropping pertinent facts like, "Did you know Lance Hendrikson is illiterate?" or "Jesus Chris Carter was a fucking hack POS."

Jeffrey Tambor hasn't had material this bad since...I forgot what I was going to say
Here is an early list of what all the jokes in Arrested Development are about:

Lucille drinks too much.

Michael's relationship with his son is too suffocating.

Will Arnett is wearing the same v-neck in every episode.

Tobias doesn't know he makes puns.

Everything Michael Cera says is funny, don't try to make sense of it or note that the delivery is identical in every instance.

fortunately they shoot most of her scenes in low light or half nude

Powerful people are hypocrites.

Lindsey is an idiot.

Buster doesn't realize how powerful the hand that Army gave him is.

Ben Stiller actually married that woman and demanded she be employed before he agreed to the project.

Liza Minnelli is disgusting. (She's not.)

Isla Fisher is disgusting. (...)

the wig is not not working for you Portia

Also, for some reason the George Sr. episode only featured one of these tropes and was otherwise completely serious except for identical twin gags, known historically as the lowest comedy there is.

people complain there are no minorities on our show, so let's make them Republicans!!! that'll teach them to stop whining about white privilege

Time has changed the other Bluth family members only for the worse. Buster's compulsive behavior has reached a frightening nadir before an African-American woman slanders his lovemaking after he murders thousands; Michael is tired, sad and a dick to the most important person in his life; George Michael is a boorish, cowardly and sexual capable liar; Lindsey becomes a prostitute and cuts her fantastic hair into a mere clump; Tobias starts dating a crack addict and is designated a sex offender; same goes for Maeby; Lucille 1 goes to jail and Gob continues to pretend to be gay for some unclear reason.

love ur style maeby

Every time someone repeats that familiar and odious cliche to me, announcing as if it had never been pronounced before, "Ah think people don't change," my loins ache and my stomach grows queasy. If that's true, then how is Anthony Weiner not sexting some coed while his wife goes on and on about the NSA leaks, waiting in vain for her husband to make a semi-decent oral joke about a whistleblower? But that isn't happening, instead Mr. Weiner is running for mayor. People do change, you just only acknowledge that shift when it suits you.

The longer you spend among those who only agree with you, the bigger the bubble becomes. After seeing the President once pull Susan Rice's pants down during an innocent game of Twister, do you honestly think anyone has the balls to contradict him during a meeting? Then again, if I had access to audio recordings of Peggy Noonan around her home, you can bet I'd listen to them with this expression on my face the entire time.

So yes, it is disappointing to find the Bluths roughly where we left them. Part of the gag is that they never learn, I suppose, but that just reinforces the idea that the show is more about wacky concepts than real people, and that I was not supposed to be turned on when the boy did that to his cousin.

More than the others, it is Maeby who I found myself most disappointed in. She wasn't like them, not only because she was not genetically related to the family itself, but because she was successful in all the aspects of life the adults were not. Instead of making anything positive come from this story, she is now just fodder for jokes about women being bad at math.

tony wonder is suddenly the only thing that matters. who's that woman?

There's a really weird scene in this version of Arrested Development where magician Tony Wonder (Ben Stiller) and his real life wife, Christine Taylor are sitting on a bed together. The two discuss tricking Gob, but it is more how easy it is for the two to be together that caught my attention. For a few days I could not get this image out of my head. Even though it was not part of the scene, it is so rare to see not only actors in the same room on Arrested Development but two people genuinely comfortable in another's presence, that I started to realize what I was missing. Two seconds later Ron Howard started loudly talking again, telling a joke only he found funny.

because what everyone wanted from this new season was...Dietrich Bader

After about the fifth or so episode, a particular loathing begins to intrude on the proceedings. It's roughly the same feeling one gets after eating a bowl of ice cream. The bowl was so good you immediately want more. You start to eat the new episodes of what you have been told is the same flavor of ice cream, but the ice became warm and sour merely through the passage of time. I don't know why anybody would put yogurt in their body.

on some level was this just an excuse to give Carl Weathers some extra spending money?

For some reason Hollywood satire is the main thread through all of this. There was this William Goldman essay where he estimated that like 3/4ths of the plays on Broadway at that time were musicals about people putting on musicals. What makes Arrested Development even worse at this overwrought genre is that the only person actually purporting to be in this industry is Ron Howard, and he is not looking great these days, although to be fair it was not as bad when he sat next to Brian Grazer.

hey, it's set design that doesn't look like it took five minutes
There was a moment for this kind of self-indulgent bullshit; but just as the original run of the show took place before its chaotic style became commonplace, this iteration just reminds us of how dated the essential subject matter is. Lampooning rich people is all in good fun until it turns out we're all worse off for the comparison. Arrested Development remains the whitest show on television, and Franklin seems a lot more racist in retrospect. Even the fiery Spanish couple looks like they were cast in Santa Monica.

that's not a "joke", George Michael, that's a moustache
After I finished these little 30 minute abominations, I had this vision of an old, decrepit Veronica Mars, where the guy who played her dad, his face has rotted, and Kristen Bell's post-baby body is a mere 7/10. I don't want to live in that world. I hope that world is buried somewhere under Joss Whedon's ego.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location where Isla Fisher can never find him.

"Echo or Encore" - Eleanor Friedberger (mp3)

"You'll Never Know Me" - Eleanor Friedberger (mp3)

The new album from Eleanor Friedberg is entitled Personal Record, and it was released on June 4th from Merge Records.