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campy

/ˈkæmpi/
IPA guide

Other forms: campily

Use the adjective campy to describe something that has a ridiculous, wacky appeal. Some movies are so exaggeratedly bad that they've got a campy kind of charm.

Anything you describe as "so bad it's good" is probably campy. Many fans of over-the-top, campy films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example, find them wonderfully funny and strange. The early 20th-century slang meaning of camp was simply "tasteless," with campy emerging in the late 1950s. The root is uncertain, but it may be the French se camper, "to put oneself in a bold, provocative pose."

Definitions of campy
  1. adjective
    providing sophisticated amusement by virtue of having artificially (and vulgarly) mannered or banal or sentimental qualities
    campy Hollywood musicals of the 1940's”
    synonyms: camp
    tasteless
    lacking aesthetic or social taste
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