By Joanna Orland
David Wain and Ken Marino have been collaborating for decades. The pair first met during their time at NYU and began making comedy together as part of the sketch group The State, which later had its own show on MTV. With eleven members and no hierarchy, the group had to be in alignment when it came to editing. “Nobody takes anything personally, but we’re all going to be brutal with the material,” recalls David of The State’s unspoken agreement. “There was a lot of ego bruising and a lot of fighting sometimes. And you knew that you might have to try writing ten things before one got to the next level. And that’s part of how we made it good.”
The State’s unique style of alt-comedy broke new ground and has carried over into David’s feature film work, which includes Role Models, Wanderlust, and They Came Together. For his first feature, David teamed with The State’s other main director, Michael Showalter, and co-created what is now the cult classic Wet Hot American Summer. While it was considered a box office bomb at the time, David was nonetheless happy to have merely made a movie. “I wasn’t even sure if we were going to finish it,” he reflects on making Wet Hot American Summer. “I was happy when it was released in a couple of theaters and bombed, because at least it came out and it was a movie.”
Over the years, the cult status of Wet Hot American Summer grew, eventually culminating in a prequel and sequel series on Netflix. After revisiting Wet Hot American Summer, David has other projects that he would like to explore again. “We’ve talked about doing a sequel to our movie Wanderlust because the cast is so great,” he says. “I’d like to do more of our TV show Childrens Hospital someday. I’m always down if it could ever work out.”
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is David’s latest collaboration with Ken, and treads familiar territory as far as their comedic sensibility goes. Reminiscent of They Came Together or Wet Hot American Summer in that it has layers upon layers of jokes and funny concepts, the film takes the narrative structure of The Wizard of Oz as its basis. “They Came Together really was very much, from design, a spoof of a genre – of rom-coms. Whereas The Wizard of Oz kind of structuring element of this movie is more just that. It’s more of like a road map we used to put this plot together and then leaned into the fun of having done that,” he clarifies.
While there is a clear fondness in his voice when David discusses his previous work or his time with The State, it’s when discussing the creative process of comedy that his eyes light up. David has a proven track record of crafting silly jokes, with the overly long gag being a particular feather in his cap. A standout moment of They Came Together is the bar scene in which Paul Rudd’s character is chatting with the bartender. The bartender comments, “Well, you came in here looking like crap and you haven’t said very much,” to which Rudd responds, “You can say that again.” Of course, the bartender does, and this conversation repeats eight more times. It’s one of those jokes that would have gotten a mild chuckle if done once. The fact that it repeats far too many times makes it funny, then unfunny, then funny again.
Gail Daughtry… has a similar overly long gag involving John Slattery’s foot getting slammed repeatedly in a door. For David, crafting a joke like this and perfecting its timing is instinctive. “It’s 100% instinct, 0% rules. I feel like you can’t bottle that set of rules. It’s impossible,” he declares. “We’ll try to dissect it. We’ll talk about it. We’ll argue it. But at the end of the day, all it is is we find this funny. And you can’t exactly say why. And if you could, then it wouldn’t be as good.”
John Slattery has many of the funniest moments in Gail Daughtry…, delivering a hilariously debasing performance. “We know John. We’ve worked with him before, and he’s so funny – like, so brilliantly funny,” David says of working with the Mad Men alum. “I heard him just in an interview yesterday saying a quote which I love, which is he said it’s one of the most unusual, different kind of characters he’s ever had to play – and it’s himself!”
Comedy is a craft like any other, and David’s writing process is more traditional and rigorous than one might expect for something so silly. “It’s a fun contrast to me, because the movie I hope comes off as funny and silly and goofy, and maybe easy in a way or breezy like – and the process behind it is the opposite,” he notes. “We’re incredibly rigorous and we dissect and work very hard on every single detail in the script, and then on the shoot, and then in every aspect of the shoot, and then in the edit.”
With a high joke density throughout his work, there is no one way that David constructs a joke. “Jokes come at all different parts of the process,” he explains. “Some of the big jokes in our movie were in the very first draft we wrote many years ago. Some came at the very end of the post-production process when we were doing the final sound mix. And everywhere in between.”
One of the funniest jokes in Gail Daughtry… comes from Tobie Windham’s security guard character when he threatens to make the gang “very sick.” As with all of his good jokes, there was a method to the madness when conceiving this one. “We wanted to curtail too much senseless violence in the movie, or at least save it for this one moment at the end,” shares David. “We didn’t want to have a lot of guns, and so we were like, ‘All right, well then what else can he threaten them with if it’s not that?’”
There’s a lot of industry talk about how hard it is to get original comedy films made today, particularly for a cinematic release. David has not only made a genuinely funny film for the sake of comedy, but he has also managed to get it into cinemas and not straight to streaming. “It certainly wasn’t easy, and it was a long road to get this made,” he elaborates. “Luckily we took it to Sundance, and whether it’s some combination of, you know, the atmosphere changing a little bit, or the pendulum going back in Hollywood, or the fact that this particular movie seemed to resonate – we did get it sold to Sony Pictures Classics, and they are giving it a real theatrical release.”
As he finishes our interview with a cheeky pause and a playful glance, the one word to sum up David Wain is…
“Gorgeous.”
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Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is in cinemas from July 10th, 2026