‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’ Review: Dumb, Fun Comedy

Last summer, it was such a treat to see The Naked Gun in theaters and laugh with giddy abandon. How rare that is these days, when most comedy is relegated to meme churn or, I guess, snarky asides in blockbuster spectaculars. An honest to goodness comedy, with no mission beyond making its audience guffaw, felt like a gift from on high. I worried we’d get nothing else like it for a long time, if ever. (I mean, I suppose there was Anaconda.) 

Thank god, then, for David Wain and Ken Marino, the longtime comedy allies who have made wonderfully absurd things together since the 1990s. They have a new film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, that is proudly stupid, a scattershot, oddball comedy that makes the friendly, generous offer of simple amusement. Gail Daughtry isn’t on a par with Wain’s true masterpiece, Wet Hot American Summer, but it is still welcomely recognizable as one of his singular creations. Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not. 

For some reason, Gail Daughtry is a Wizard of Oz homage — though, don’t worry, there’s nary a wheezy Wicked joke to be found in the whole picture. Zoey Deutch, bright and chipper with a glint of something darker in her eyes, plays the titular Kansan, a high-school cheerleader turned hairdresser who has just gotten engaged to her former football captain boyfriend. All is well in their sunshiny little life, in their cute little town, until Gail’s fiancé quite suddenly makes good on his “celebrity sex pass” — an agreement that, supposedly, many couples have. (You know the concept: a monogamous couple’s compact that each party may sleep with one famous crush, with impunity, should the improbable opportunity arise.) We do, in fact, meet the celebrity in question, but I won’t spoil who that is here. 

This sends Gail into something of a tailspin, and prompts her to take a trip to Los Angeles with her queer bestie, Otto (a winning Miles Gutierrez-Riley), where she ultimately decides that she’ll need to bed her celebrity pass — nice Midwestern boy Jon Hamm, of course — in order to balance the scales. And thus a wacky yellow brick road adventure begins, Gail and Otto (which might be an anagram for something…) picking up a few new friends along the way. There’s a scarecrow-ish CAA assistant (Ben Wang), a not-so-heartless paparazzo (Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. It’s a game ensemble, all grooving on the peculiar and erratic rhythms of Wain’s (and Marino’s) comic sensibility. 

Jokes abound in Gail Daughtry, some short bursts of profanity and non sequitur, others more cerebral and longform. (Though, not that cerebral, really.) The gags fly fast and furious enough that it doesn’t really matter that plenty of them miss. At a Sundance full of depressingly unfunny comedies, Gail Daughtry seems practically Mark Twain Prize-worthy in comparison. 

Explaining any of the good stuff in detail would kind of kill the surprise, but I’ll say in broad overview that there’s a great hotel concierge bit, a riotously repetitive sequence of simple slapstick, a fugue of clever wordplay about the Wright Brothers (of all people). There’s cartoonish violence, over-the-top sex, and some inside-baseball Hollywood stuff that’s not too insidery, or too baseball-y.

The film certainly sags in places, stretches where Wain and Marino could have tightened up the timing, or simply added more jokes. But the overall effect of Gail Daughtry is to re-create the happily zonked university afternoons during which so many fans of my generation steeped ourselves in the elegant inanity of Wain’s output. (Wet Hot was something of a holy grail on my college campus, as it was no doubt on many others.) It’s a kick to have this particular vibe return to us after so long; it’s the first Wain film of its kind in over a decade, though of course there were the Wet Hot miniseries to tide us over. 

The film was clearly made on the cheap (though, it was done so in actual Los Angeles, which is commendable!) and the humor is not exactly the most broadly accessible. Thus, I don’t really know what its commercial viability might be, even on streaming. But I hope that Gail Daughtry finds its eager audience, and that those viewers then begin to clamor for more such movies, the kind that dare to go for a laugh without trying to reassure us of their hip, irony-vetted intelligence. Y’know, good old-fashioned comedies that aim for the gut while, yes, lightly tickling the mind. It’s high time to get dumb again — at least at the movies.