Kevin Landers-WKUK and Camp

Susan Sontag wrote a number of compelling ideas about the origin and nature of Camp. In addressing just a few of these ideas, I hope to illuminate the tenets of Camp used by the IFC sketch comedy Whitest Kids U’ Know, and the various ways that such tenets are employed. The particular points i would like to engage with are numbers 9-11 (that Camp responds to the exaggerated and attenuated, that Camp puts everything in quotation marks, and that Camp is the triumph of the epicene style) and 18-20 (the sections referring to unintentional camp as the best/purest form, and arguing that intentional camp is rarely if ever satisfying). pp. 279-282. I have chosen two sketches from WKUK’s repertoire to emphasize both what I agree with and disagree with from Sontag’s assessment. The first sketch, above, is a fictionalized account of the assassination of Lincoln. While the main action of the sketch deals with Lincoln’s exaggerated gestures as he accosts the crowd from his viewing box, the scene is underscored by two of the troupe’s actors pretending to act out a horribly interpreted version of Hamlet, which has been melded together with Othello and Dracula. The second sketch, below, concerns a wife catching her husband in an act of anonymous sex in a public restroom. Both sketches feature male actors portraying another actor’s wife without playing that for the joke, and each utilizes camp, particularly in the realm of “being-as-playing-a-role,” as well as the use of camp to a deliberately humorous end. Both sketches employ crude physical insinuations (Lincoln’s unabashed threats and the Husband’s unrelenting continuance at the “glory hole” in spite of his wife’s berating him) as a means of distancing the audience from one of the characters and deliberately use campy gestures and themes to humorously paint the characters, first Lincoln, and then the husband, as immoral and unintelligent oafs.