Review: Camp Camp “Reigny Day”

We return from a week break (that I desperately needed) for the halfway point of the season. Apparently due to the unprecedented positive response, Camp Camp has gotten two additional episodes added to its first season, so we may get to see some developments happen faster than we originally thought, as well as play into some of things fans have shown favor in. Hopefully I spoke a bit soon in my mental breakdown last review.

SPOILERS

Though if I did, this episode doesn’t lend to that idea. This week, a rainy day gets in the way of David’s chance to impress some camp critiquing committee. In haste, David decides to improvise and make regular background character Dolph into the counselor for the day, but that begins to escalate as he quickly usurps power and authority. Meanwhile, Neil goes missing, so Max and Nikki go on a mystery to find him, with Nikki hoping for the worst (not a typo). Soon enough, the two plots converge, Neil is found, and Dolph gets the award David so desperately wanted. Also, Neil is Jewish, I guess.

Anywho, the navel-gazing, pretentious, short-sighted bit of analysis we’ll be discussing today is how to wear out a joke. For those of you who watch this show, especially for this episode, you probably noticed that Dolph’s whole schtick is that he’s basically little Adolph Hitler. He says Nazi things, speaks in a German accent, raises his hand in a Nazi salute…he’s a Nazi. That’s the joke. The first few episodes handled this rather cutely, giving him a couple lines here or there to let us in on the gag. It was good for an added laugh, used in small doses, and didn’t overshadow the scene at hand. Now we have an entire episode about it, and the joke is now deader than concentration camp resident after a shower.

Camp Camp, whether intentionally or not, reminds me of certain aspects in an HBO show called Silicon Valley, a show about nerdy programmers in California running tech companies. Like Camp Camp, they usually have a rap song play at the end of an episode. In Silicon Valley’s case, this is meant to be ironic, as the music goes completely against the image the characters on the show give off. Why Camp Camp seems to be doing a similar trick is beyond me since it doesn’t have nearly the same effect, but I digress.

Also in Silicon Valley is a character named Jared, who is nice, supportive, and a diligent assistant almost to a fault…and sometimes actually to a fault. In addition, Jared sometimes lets things slip about his home life or philosophies or even start screaming German in his sleep that hints at stranger and stranger things, which we laugh at because they’re weird but also make us think about what all of it is leading to. It’s a small joke here or there that adds to the comedy as well as Jared’s character.

Bringing this back to Dolph, they got some of the hinting down right in the earlier episodes, but I guess they lost their patience and just decided to tap that well now. So, in the end, we get a whole episode dedicated to a joke that was already a bit much in small doses, and blasts it all over the episode until it means nothing at all. I’d say it was a shame, but it seems pretty clear that not many of these characters are really meant to be anything more than one or two gags in their entire make-up.

Beyond that, David actually seems to get a sliver of development, showing clear desperation in impressing the cloaked Camp Critic Committee and wanting to prove himself as a counselor as well as legitimizing Camp Campbell’s cheap methods. Nikki’s still fun, almost so eager for Neil to be dead for the thrill of a mystery that she might have killed himself if she had the chance. And Max continues to be just an unlikable shit that is a shallow pool full of annoying. All in all, better than the last few, but we just seem to be reverberating between average and below average writing here, so I’ll take what I can get. Maybe the two added episodes will show some marked improvement to make me more optimistic about the likely renewal this show will get.