Matt Heath: I Literally Popped A Rib Out Laughing Watching 'Wet Hot American Summer'

Frenetic and outlandish comedy worth the pain of a popped rib.

Until this week I thought "side-splittingly funny" was just a saying. A metaphor. A joke. Then I watched Wet Hot American Summer on Netflix and physically popped a rib out laughing. By which I mean I literally split my side. My third rib from the bottom on the left is now cracked and sticking out a bit. It was horribly horribly painful. Still is.

I'm a huge fan of the original 2001 film of the same name but the series takes it to new a level. There are jokes from the first second of the show. The highest gag-per-minute ratio since Aeroplane. Too many gags for my health.

My partner and I were watching on the laptop in bed. We were giggling away. It was fun. But the laughs just kept building and building, relentlessly funny, stupidly brilliant joke after stupidly brilliant joke. From Andy's ridiculously rebellious motor bike arrival to dirty Arty "The Beekeeper" and his radio station. Coop's reunion with his "girlfriend" Donna and the toxic waste.

I started laughing uncontrollably. My sides were really starting to hurt. The show is ruthless and relentless. I hugged myself to make the pain stop. But it was too late, they cut to posh Camp Tigerclaw followed by a burping contest and my rib just popped out of place. I went from "ha ha ha" to "Aargh help me, help me" in half an episode.

In the show's defence my rib had been loosened years earlier during a TV station promo. I was racing a guy from the band Shapeshifter on a moon hopper. The first take went fine but on the second things went horribly wrong. I fell off, he miss-bounced and his full weight came crashing down on my left side. Off to hospital.

Broken ribs are terrible. They can't bind you up because you need to keep breathing. Which sucks because breathing really hurts. It took six weeks for my ribs to heal and 12 minutes of Wet Hot American Summer to re-break them.

We had to continue watching,

Wet Hot is too good to stop. So I wrapped a sheet around my torso, drank a quarter bottle of the kids' delicious orange flavoured Pamol and soldiered on. It wasn't easy. Two or three minutes at a time then pause as the pain of laughing got too much. We binged through all eight episodes like this in one go.

The show is set at Camp Firewood in 1981 and follows the adventures of kids and their councillors. It features a lot of big-name stars in their 30s and 40s playing 16-year-olds. Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Jason Schwartzman, Kristen Wiig, to name a few. The plots are fast-paced, purposely cheesy and as outlandish as possible. Drama that would normally stretch over several episodes plays out in minutes.

The show jumps seamlessly between filthy and innocent. Mean and nice. Sometimes it's funny because it religiously follows cliches and sometimes because it brutally stomps on them.

There are no rules.

Writer-director David Wain is a clever man. If you like the show, check out his movies They Came Together and Role Models, and of course the original Wet Hot American Summer.

I was lucky enough to meet the man when he was visiting Auckland many years ago. More accurately, I made a drunken fool of myself in front of him at a bar on K Rd. "Hey dude, your movie is funny!" "Thanks." "No, seriously, your movie is really really funny." "Thanks." "No, seriously man, your movie was really really really funny." "Thanks."

This went on for 20 minutes. It's testament to what a nice guy he is that he didn't tell me to piss off. Maybe that's why the A-list came back for a low-budget prequel to a low-budget movie.

Wet Hot American Summer is dangerously funny, side-splittingly funny, rib-breakingly hilarious. So stupid. So clever. So brilliant. So painful. There are few shows in the world worth the torture.

NZ Herald