Showalter went to a few camps before finding one that he liked—a small camp, with no structure and no supervision. “There was a camp across the lake that had matching uniforms; they were all very athletic and well-kempt,” he tells me. “Camp Mohawk was truly like the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter”—a niche reference to a late-’70s classroom sitcom that wouldn’t be out of place among the other latchkey-kid arcana name-dropped across Wet Hot, but also one that evokes something of the film’s period flavor, with its wardrobe of ringer tees and tube socks. (As Theo observes, “only the shortest shorts in history were allowed in this movie.”)
Modin “was supposed to be sporty and arty and all the summer camp things, but was pretty low-key,” Wain recalls. “Most things were broken; a lot of the activity at camp was just, like, hanging out and making out.” In Wet Hot, while Rudd’s Andy is nominally on lifeguard duty at the waterfront, he displays a frankly depraved indifference to the well-being of the campers, which jibes with what Wain recalls as the “free-range” childcare attitudes of the ’80s. “Unlike in a lot of camp movies, we showed the fact that the counselors often didn’t really care what the kids were doing. When I was a sixteen-year-old junior counselor, the last thing on my mind was what my campers were doing. I was interested in what my friends were up to.”
An early gag about Camp Firewood’s laissez-faire discipline—boys and girls sneaking out of one another’s bunks at reveille, before counselors are roused from their hangovers—also has its roots in Wain’s memories. “We were supposed to stay in our bunks after lights out, but every boy snuck out in the middle of the night and walked down the long camp road, crossed the highway, down the girls’ side camp road, then into the girls’ side at night, then snuck back before morning,” Wain recalls. “[Of course, counselors] were like, ‘That’s not allowed.’ But there were certain nights where they were like: ‘Tonight, it’s really not allowed.’”
As a camper, Wain says, the Wet Hot character he most resembled was Arty “The Beekeeper” Solomon (Liam Norton, voiced by Samm Levine), the eleven-year-old DJ of the camp radio station, whose patter stitches the movie’s sketches together, like Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing or the loudspeaker announcements in M*A*S*H. Also of note: Arty hasn’t taken a shower all summer; it’s played for laughs but, for pubescent boys navigating sensibilities around changing clothes in not particularly private bunks, this detail could seem observational. “I was definitely the kid who was reluctant to take a shower,” Wain explains. “I also remember being a counselor and parents being like, ‘Why is my kid such a slob?’ You know, we’re not going to change in two months what you took fifteen years to create.”
Wet Hot American Summer spends more time on the camp’s freaks and geeks than on its jocks and preppies. There’s a goth girl, a boy who dresses like Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy and kids displaying several flavors of as-yet-undiagnosed neurodivergence. Wain was already a comedy nerd at that age—he taped Steve Martin specials on his family’s Betamax and played them back over and over—and became a “class clown” at camp. “One of my famous bits was that I would do a lip sync to ‘My Sharona’ at the talent show,” he recalls. “It became my ‘thing.’ The next talent show, I would come on as if I’m doing some other act—and then suddenly it would be revealed I’m going to do a lip sync to ‘My Sharona.’ As I say it, it sounds so freaking stupid, but that’s what it was.”