The Importance of Being Ernest Part 1: Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

My 9 part exploration of the films of Ernest P. Worrell begins with an earnest appreciation of 1987's Ernest Goes to Camp

I was shocked and disgusted to discover that 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp is not available legally through streaming in God’s own United States. I don’t want to say that this alone single-handedly invalidates streaming but any home video medium that cannot facilitate the easy and legal viewing of Ernest Goes to Camp is fatally flawed. 

We as a society NEED free and easy access to Ernest Goes to Camp. It’s IMPORTANT. Children need Ernest P. Worrell’s first cinematic vehicle so that they may experience joy the likes of which they never thought possible but also so that they might learn from it as well. 

In his own unpretentious way, Ernest P. Worrell has much to teach us about what it means to be human. He isn’t just an unusually American pop culture icon. No, Ernest P. Worrell IS America. 

Ernest P. Worrell represents everything that’s good about the American character: our indefatigable optimism, can-do spirit, irrepressible ambition and homespun, folksy charm and good humor. Yet for reasons I cannot begin to fathom the Ernest-loving masses need to buy old-fashioned DVDs in order to experience a cinematic debut that shook the world like none since Citizen Kane. 

I don’t want to sound like Armond White writing about Adam Sandler but Jim Varney is the only true genius our country has ever produced. He is the quintessential common man, a denim-clad working class hero and son of the South beloved by the REAL AMERICANS who make our country great: long-haul truckers and Waffle House employees and Juggalos. 

Compare that to a lesser artist and thinker like Paul Thomas Anderson, who makes movies only for the moneyed, cultured elites. Ernest P. Worrell—the character, not Jim Varney—could easily make a movie like The Master but Anderson could never create something like Ernest Goes to Africa. 

Ernest made movies that give the suffering masses escape and a reason to live. Paul Thomas Anderson makes movies exclusively for Noah Baumbach’s late mother. Who is the greater artist? No one can say but it’s clearly Ernest. 

In Ernest Goes to Camp Jim Varney plays Ernest as an unassuming man with a dream. Though he toils happily as a much-abused handyman and janitor at Camp Kickakee he aspires to the ostensibly more dignified job of counselor.  

It’s okay to be working class in movies like this as long as you long for something more. So a janitor has to dream of being a camp counselor, who in turn must long to be head counselor. The head counselor must then aspire to own a camp someday while a camp owner would probably look back longingly at his time as a handy-man/janitor. 

Varney honed the character of Ernest through the last legitimate American art form: local television commercials. The popularity and visibility he attained through his work as a ubiquitous and in-demand pitchman 1980 onward afforded him an opportunity to make the leap in the truest and most American of cinematic sub-genres: the slobs versus snobs summer camp comedy. 

The snobs are the WASPy campers and counselors of Camp Kikakee, who abuse Ernest physically and emotionally. The lovable everyman just wants to fit in and be accepted and must endure an endless gauntlet of humiliation as a result. 

No matter how badly he’s treated, Ernest never loses his positive attitude or lust for life. He’s Christ-like in his selflessness and ability to withstand the worst humanity has to offer without losing faith or giving into darkness or cynicism. 

The slobs are the outcasts of the State Institute for Boys. They’re the juvenile delinquents of today and the full-on felons of tomorrow. They’re the human scum who will rob your grandmother’s retirement home, set homeless people on fire and execute low-level Ponzi schemes. 

At least that’s how they’re treated by the popular, snobby counselors: as sub-human riff-raff fit only for incarceration. The only person who believes in these boys is Ernest, a natural friend and ally of the underdog. 

The surly rebels from the State Institute for Boys are decked out in the height of New Wave fashion circa 1982. They look like members of Kajagoogoo’s entourage with their totally eighties shades, ties over tee-shirts, Summer vests and sports coats/ football tee shirt combos. 

And half-shirts! So, so many half-shirts on embarrassed-looking children! 

The top counselor at Camp Kikakee is initially put in charge of the rebels from the State Institute for Boys but when he decides to drown an African-American child by throwing him into deep water despite knowing that he can’t swim Ernest is promoted.

The slobs have a strategic partnership with the Native Americans who own the land Camp Kikakee rents every summer, more specifically Old Indian 'Chief St. Cloud’ (Iron Eyes Cody), one of only two surviving members of a once-mighty tribe. 

For decades, Cody was one of the most ubiquitous and popular Native American character actors around. He was more or less a professional Native American best known for his roles in the 1948 Bob Hope comedy Paleface and for playing the Native American who weeps with despair about littering in a popular series of public service announcements in the 1970s. 

The only problem was that a man who pretty much only played Native Americans wasn’t actually Native American. Not in the least. No, Iron Eyes Cody was instead Sicilian but that didn’t keep him from cashing in. 

When I went to summer camp around the time Ernest Goes to Camp takes place it was common for my fellow campers to claim Native American heritage. Everyone was one sixteenth Sioux, or somehow Lakota somewhere on their mother’s side. 

These fake Indians and wannabe Indians reflected the tacky, oblivious appropriation of Native American life and lore at the heart of so many half-ass summer camps. In Ernest Goes to Camp, the soulful caricature of a wise old Indian played by Hollywood’s preeminent fake Indian explicitly deems the white children in New Wave garb the true heirs of his fallen brothers and sisters. 

Chief Big Faker’s granddaughter tells a parasite interested in their valuable land, “My grandfather thinks of those boys as young braves who keep alive the tradition of our ancestors.”

Ernest Goes to Camp delivers the inclusive message that you don’t actually have to be Native American in order to, you know, be Native American. You just need to have the right spirit, make a headdress and/or teepee, chant something that sounds indigenous and boom, you embody the proud essence of the Lakota warrior despite being a weird asthmatic Jewish kid who smells like pee. 

The State Institute for Boys rejects repay Ernest kindness and belief with unrelenting cruelty but Ernest’s spirit, his mighty, mighty spirit is not crushed until he’s fired from his dream job due to a combination of sabotage and incompetence. 

Then something unexpected and wonderful happens: Ernest P. Worrell sings. Ernest doesn’t just sing; Ernest sings from the heart. Ernest sings from the soul. Ernest sings a tender ballad about the overwhelming despair and melancholy coursing through his being without even the faintest hint of humor. 

Ernest Goes to Camp aims unabashedly for pathos in a way that could easily be cringe-inducing and embarrassing but instead is enormously powerful and moving. 

It’s yet another illustration that actor playing the titular cornball is semi-furtively an extraordinarily talented, versatile performer who could do a whole lot more than engage in cornpone hijnks but seldom had an opportunity to show what he was truly capable of. 

The primary villain in Ernest Goes to Camp is played, appropriately and inevitably enough, by John Vernon, the ultimate glowering WASP heavy thanks to his iconic turn as the Dean in Animal House. 

Sherman Krader is the head of an evil mining corporation who wants the land the camp is on because it has a valuable mineral known as Petrocite and, in the film’s climax, goes to war with Ernest’s campers, who Old Indian 'Chief St. Cloud’ deputizes as emergency Native Americans so that they can wage fiery, righteous holy war against Krader and his paleface infidels. 

In a dazzlingly offensive climax, it turns out that Ernest P. Worrell, humorously incompetent caucasian and super-cracker, embodies the heroic essence of the righteous Native American warrior because the Holy Spirit protects him from Krader’s bullets. 

Because Ernest Goes to Camp is a Touchstone production from 1987 it also includes multiple inspirational montages set to pop songs with lyrics like, “Fighting for the rights of dreamers!/Brave Hearts, You and me, we are the true believers!/We’re gonna make it together/Others may fail we say never!” 

Ernest Goes to Camp made Varney a slapstick superstar but his performance is defined as much by his underrated flair for verbal comedy, particularly in the character’s penchant for grandiosity and verbosity. 

Ernest talks for the pleasure of talking. He seems only vaguely conscious of the words tumbling out of his mouth, like when he’s getting a shot and, in his terror, confesses to both stealing the Lindberg baby AND being Nazi butcher Josef Mengele. 

Later he favors his campers with an undoubtedly fictional account of his time in the shit in Vietnam. In scattered moments like these, Ernest Goes to Camp aspires to do more than just amuse slow-witted children and succeeds. 

I have now seen Ernest Goes to Camp two and a half times and am still surprised and delighted by it. Childhood nostalgia undoubtedly plays a role but I also genuinely think Varney is comic genius as well as an absurdly likable performer seemingly without a mean or a fake bone in his rubbery body.