History Main / CAMP

* Music/{{Ghost}} is known for a deliberately campy take on HollywoodSatanism; their overall schtick can be summed up as channeling the theatrical flair of Music/AliceCooper into a Satanic parody of Catholocism. The singer wears papal outfits and a skull-painted mask, the band is completely disguised and is only referred to as "a pack of Nameless Ghouls", stages often have backdrops like massive stained glass murals from cathedrals, and concerts are referred to as "rituals" in reference to a song on their debut album.

* ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry''. In the second game the developers forgot this, but the third game made up for it in spades. For reference, at different points in time the main protagonist has used a [[VideoGame/DevilMayCry5 motorbike chainsaw]], [[VideoGame/DevilMayCry3 a scythe that's also a guitar]] made out of a HornyDevil, and [[VideoGame/DevilMayCry4 a "demon backpack"]]. He also repeatedly gets impailed as a RunningGag to the point where in 5 it's [[spoiler:actually a game mechanic.]]

* Music/{{Ghost}} is known for a deliberately campy take on RockMeAsmodeus; their overall schtick can be summed up as channeling the theatrical flair of Music/AliceCooper into a Satanic parody of Catholocism. The singer wears papal outfits and a skull-painted mask, the band is completely disguised and is only referred to as "a pack of Nameless Ghouls", stages often have backdrops like massive stained glass murals from cathedrals, and concerts are referred to as "rituals" in reference to a song on their debut album.

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* Music/{{Liberace}}, whose act was magnificent high camp, but who in life sucessfully sued newspapers for even hinting that he was gay, maintaining that he was straight despite the facade. After his death from AIDS, the truth was out.

* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'': During the Eric Kripke era, Seasons 1-5, the show tried, often successfully, to avoid the campiness associated with many low-budget genre series. Not that a bad episode or two, like "Bugs" didn't sneak in and there were intentionally silly episodes such as "Tall Tales" and episodes like "The Monster at the End of this Book" that thrived on LeaningOnTheFourthWall. However, once Kripke left the series, the show introduced more over-the-top, cartoonish villains, and villains like Crowley and Lucifer, who had been genuinely menacing in early seasons, became jokey. The show started relying more on obvious CGI, queerbaiting its audience relentlessly, and generally began feeling like a parody of its earlier, superior seasons.

* ''Anime/{{Yugioh}}'' has its lapses into this due to its premise in which [[MemeticMutation card games are]] SeriousBusiness and its English dub's hammy voice acting.

%%* ''Film/{{Xanadu}}''

* If Creator/YoshiyukiTomino is in a good mood while directing a HumongousMecha show, chances are good that it'll fall into this. If not [[KillEmAll well...]]

* Music/{{Kesha}}'s music is loaded with over-the-top teen party imagery, cheesy lyrics, silly youth slang, and an exaggerated ValleyGirl accent {{autotune}}d up the wazoo.

* The music videos for Boys Town Gang's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWHZxXuJFzw Can't Take My Eyes Off of You]] and Armi ja Danny's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPnGPIMUnus I Wanna Love You Tender]] exude camp.

* The entire HairMetal genre was practically born out of this trope. The three main things in common with the bands in the genre were: a combination of EightiesHair and outrageous outfits, over-the-top EpicRocking, and many, many [[PowerBallad power ballads]]. Their stage acts, especially in the genre's 80s heyday, involved over-the-top lighting and special effects (coupled with gratuitous pyrotechnics). Not even it's early 90s demise with the arrival of {{Grunge}} and the constant bashing of the genre's image and attitude by metal purists were able to snuff out the genre's legacy and long-term popularity.

Derives from the French gay community's slang term ''se camper'', meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion". The term "'''Camp'''" morphed into referring to a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricality, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content, as Susan Sontag famously defined the term in her short essay "[[https://web.archive.org/web/20140514001236/http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html Notes on Camp".]] [[SlidingScaleOfSillinessVersusSeriousness Don't expect it to take itself the least bit seriously.]]

* 19th century dandies, including Creator/OscarWilde and Creator/LordByron. Not all of them were necessarily gay, [[CampStraight but they were all extremely camp]], which is required for being a dandy.

** The new series, faced with the terrifying prospect of a reasonable budget and cheap and high-quality special effects being widely available by that point, perhaps overcompensated for this by having a DarkerAndEdgier Doctor - one who was now the LastOfHisKind, wore [[PuttingOnTheReich a black leather jacket that, in WWII London, has a fellow time traveller compare him to a U-Boat Captain]] and a [[ImportantHaircut shaved head]] and had committed double genocide as BackStory - fighting mostly extremely goofy comedy monsters over his short run, with the notable exceptions being the Daleks, a "serious" but legendarily campy [[TheFifties 50s]] BMovie-like monster [[{{Reconstruction}} played painfully straight here]] and the Empty Child (whose double parter is considered to be one of the best and creepiest stories in the show's history). The worry was that, with good special effects, the NarmCharm responsible for a lot of the campy appeal would be lost, and so it had to be added by replacing "low camp" with "high camp" - not least to avoid traumatising children (which [[NightmareFuel the original series cared about much less]], being by far the goriest show on the BBC at the time). By the second series, the Doctor got more mellow and the monsters got (mostly) spookier, finding what is generally agreed to be a good middle ground - and it's still camp as hell. Since then, it's yo-yo'd between gleefully embracing the camp and playing up the drama (the John Simm incarnation of the Master epitomising this by starting his takeover by bellowing "HERE! COME! THE DRUMS!" and bopping along to Rogue Traders' "Voodoo Child", then casually ordering the deaths of 600 million people because he thinks the word 'decimate' sounds nice).
** Even some of the Nu-Who music comes under this - composer Murray Gold, when creating a {{Leitmotif}} for the Doctor's alien-ness, was deliberately asked to do it as a ClicheStorm, so he went with an operatic OneWomanWail. This was nicknamed by him "Flavia's Theme", after an extremely campy OneSceneWonder Time Lady in the story "The Five Doctors", who he could imagine singing it. It's deliberately overly dramatic, but at the same time hits exactly the emotional button it's supposed to push - both {{Angst}} and the promise of adventure.

** Lampshaded in David Tennant and Catherine Tate's "Let's Do It" video in which Tate's Julie Gardner asked Tennant's Russell T. Davies, "let's revamp - make more camp - a sci-fi show from yesteryear".

** The new series, faced with the terrifying prospect of a reasonable budget and cheap and high-quality special effects being widely available by that point, perhaps overcompensated for this by having a DarkerAndEdgier Doctor - one who was now the LastOfHisKind, wore [[PuttingOnTheReich a black leather jacket that, in WWII London, has a fellow time traveller compare him to a U-Boat Captain]] and a [[ExpositoryHairstyle shaved head]] and had committed double genocide as BackStory - fighting mostly extremely goofy comedy monsters over his short run, with the notable exceptions being the Daleks, a "serious" but legendarily campy [[TheFifties 50s]] BMovie-like monster [[{{Reconstruction}} played painfully straight here]] and the Empty Child (whose double parter is considered to be one of the best and creepiest stories in the show's history). The worry was that, with good special effects, the NarmCharm responsible for a lot of the campy appeal would be lost, and so it had to be added by replacing "low camp" with "high camp" - not least to avoid traumatising children (which [[NightmareFuel the original series cared about much less]], being by far the goriest show on the BBC at the time). By the second series, the Doctor got more mellow and the monsters got (mostly) spookier, finding what is generally agreed to be a good middle ground - and it's still camp as hell. Since then, it's yo-yo'd between gleefully embracing the camp and playing up the drama (the John Simm incarnation of the Master epitomising this by starting his takeover by bellowing "HERE! COME! THE DRUMS!" and bopping along to Rogue Traders' "Voodoo Child", then casually ordering the deaths of 600 million people because he thinks the word 'decimate' sounds nice).

See also CampGay, MachoCamp and CampStraight. Compare SoBadItsGood, StylisticSuck and NarmCharm. Related to LargeHam and WorldOfHam. Not to be confused with the movie ''Film/Camp2003'', nor has anything to do with a CampingEpisode.

** The new series, faced with the terrifying prospect of a reasonable budget and cheap and high-quality special effects being widely available by that point, perhaps overcompensated for this by having a DarkerAndEdgier Doctor - one who was now the LastOfHisKind, wore [[PuttingOnTheReich a black leather jacket that, in WWII London, has a fellow time traveller compare him to a U-Boat Captain]] and a [[ExpositoryHairstyle shaved head]] and had committed double genocide as BackStory - fighting mostly extremely goofy comedy monsters over his short run, with the notable exceptions being the Daleks, a "serious" but legendarily campy [[TheFifties 50s]] BMovie-like monster {{Reconstruction played painfully straight here}} and the Empty Child (whose double parter is considered to be one of the best and creepiest stories in the show's history). The worry was that, with good special effects, the NarmCharm responsible for a lot of the campy appeal would be lost, and so it had to be added by replacing "low camp" with "high camp" - not least to avoid traumatising children (which [[NightmareFuel the original series cared about much less]], being by far the goriest show on the BBC at the time). By the second series, the Doctor got more mellow and the monsters got (mostly) spookier, finding what is generally agreed to be a good middle ground - and it's still camp as hell. Since then, it's yo-yo'd between gleefully embracing the camp and playing up the drama (the John Simm incarnation of the Master epitomising this by starting his takeover by bellowing "HERE! COME! THE DRUMS!" and bopping along to Rogue Traders' "Voodoo Child", then casually ordering the deaths of 600 million people because he thinks the word 'decimate' sounds nice).

** The new series, faced with the terrifying prospect of a reasonable budget and cheap and high-quality special effects being widely available by that point, perhaps overcompensated for this by having a DarkerAndEdgier Doctor - one who was now the LastOfHisKind, wore [[PuttingOnTheReich a black leather jacket that, in WWII London, has a fellow time traveller compare him to a U-Boat Captain]] and a [[ExpositoryHairstyle shaved head]] and had committed double genocide as BackStory - fighting mostly extremely goofy comedy monsters over his short run, with the notable exceptions being the Daleks, a "serious" but legendarily campy [[TheFifties 50s]] BMovie-like monster [[Reconstruction played painfully straight here]] and the Empty Child (whose double parter is considered to be one of the best and creepiest stories in the show's history). The worry was that, with good special effects, the NarmCharm responsible for a lot of the campy appeal would be lost, and so it had to be added by replacing "low camp" with "high camp" - not least to avoid traumatising children (which [[NightmareFuel the original series cared about much less]], being by far the goriest show on the BBC at the time). By the second series, the Doctor got more mellow and the monsters got (mostly) spookier, finding what is generally agreed to be a good middle ground - and it's still camp as hell. Since then, it's yo-yo'd between gleefully embracing the camp and playing up the drama (the John Simm incarnation of the Master epitomising this by starting his takeover by bellowing "HERE! COME! THE DRUMS!" and bopping along to Rogue Traders' "Voodoo Child", then casually ordering the deaths of 600 million people because he thinks the word 'decimate' sounds nice).

** The new series, faced with the terrifying prospect of a reasonable budget and cheap and high-quality special effects being widely available by that point, perhaps overcompensated for this by having a DarkerAndEdgier Doctor - one who was now the LastOfHisKind, wore [[PuttingOnTheReich a black leather jacket that, in WWII London, has a fellow time traveller compare him to a U-Boat Captain]] and a [[ExpositoryHairstyle shaved head]] and had committed double genocide as BackStory - fighting mostly extremely goofy comedy monsters over his short run, with the notable exceptions being the Daleks, a "serious" but legendarily campy [[TheFifties 50s]] BMovie-like monster [[ReconstructedTrope played painfully straight here]] and the Empty Child (whose double parter is considered to be one of the best and creepiest stories in the show's history). The worry was that, with good special effects, the NarmCharm responsible for a lot of the campy appeal would be lost, and so it had to be added by replacing "low camp" with "high camp" - not least to avoid traumatising children (which [[NightmareFuel the original series cared about much less]], being by far the goriest show on the BBC at the time). By the second series, the Doctor got more mellow and the monsters got (mostly) spookier, finding what is generally agreed to be a good middle ground - and it's still camp as hell. Since then, it's yo-yo'd between gleefully embracing the camp and playing up the drama (the John Simm incarnation of the Master epitomising this by starting his takeover by bellowing "HERE! COME! THE DRUMS!" and bopping along to Rogue Traders' "Voodoo Child", then casually ordering the deaths of 600 million people because he thinks the word 'decimate' sounds nice).

Derives from the French gay community's slang term ''se camper'', meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion". The term "'''Camp'''" morphed into referring to a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricality, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content, as Susan Sontag famously defined the term in her short essay "[[http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html Notes on Camp".]] [[SlidingScaleOfSillinessVersusSeriousness Don't expect it to take itself the least bit seriously.]]

* David Lynch's ''Film/{{Dune}}'' suffered from [[TroubledProduction issues]] for almost the entire decade leading up to its release, and the end result is a [[CompressedAdaptation compressed]], confusing, joyride of a movie. Highlights include [[LargeHam Baron Harkonnen]] laughing and shouting crazily as he [[MakesSenseInContext floats around]], a soundtrack by [[CultSoundtrack Toto]], and Sting's oiled body.