Strangers with Candy (Paul Dinello, US)

The broadest explanation for why people laugh is the “incongruity theory,” to be found in the writings of Blaise Pascal and Arthur Schopenhauer (the latter proposed what’s known as the “theory of the ludicrous”). The incongruity theory posits that laughter is a reaction to a dissonance between our expectations of a scenario and its actual outcome; the laugh conveys surprise at an illogical or contradictory state of affairs, but also understanding of the situation, which is in itself pleasing. Laughter is also a literal expression of relief. Reporting from the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter in Tuebingen, Germany, a writer for The Economist explained that “laughter, incapacitating as it is, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed.” The danger might take form simply as a joke that goes exactly too far, resulting in a moment of vertiginous suspense between signal and response.

The serenely inappropriate Strangers with Candy, the half-hour sitcom that aired on Comedy Central for 30 episodes in 1999–2000, revelled in all things ugly, queasy, dangerous, and painful, and seemed to have few qualms about awkward silences and how best to break them. The show sent middle-aged Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) back to her family and high school after 30-plus sordid years of prostitution, jail time, and multi-drug addiction, and each instalment took form as a funhouse-mirror image of an ABC after-school special, contriving a crisis in order to raise a big issue—dating, peer pressure, body image, bereavement—and swiftly resolve it. By flipping and contorting the genre’s delivery system of scare tactics and neat homilies, Strangers with Candy, newly available on DVD as a six-disc box set, sailed past glib parody to arrive at an airtight incongruity theory of its own devising. The lessons that Jerri learned by each episode’s end were unfailingly twisted, yet they often had the ring of antithetical common sense: that anorexia is a good attention-getting device; that aiming low is more practical than dreaming big; that lying, violence, and drug use can be effective means of self-advancement. “You’re only as ugly as we think you are,” explains Mr. Chuck Noblet (Stephen Colbert), Jerri’s cruel and factually challenged history teacher, giving her valuable insight into social perception and group psychology. When her father is mauled to death before her eyes by a pack of rabid dogs (mascots from a rival high school, actually), Jerri realizes that “You never really lose your parents, unless, of course, they die, and then they’re gone forever, and nothing can bring them back.”

The mutant brainchild of former Second City compatriots Sedaris, Colbert, and Paul Dinello, Strangers with Candy based its protagonist on the ‘70s motivational speaker Florrie Fisher, and borrowed many a detail and bon mot from her sticky back pages: her abortions, her laminectomy, her “18-carat pimp.” Further cogitation on the hydraulics of SWC’s humour runs the risk of sucking the air out of its perhaps ineffable pleasures: as a showcase for a mean, racist, illiterate, pan-sexual, malodorous 46-year-old high-school-freshman junkie whore with cottage-cheese thighs, a riot of facial tics, a raging case of syphilis, and an inexhaustible arsenal of grimy street slang, as well as her supporting cast of bullying schoolmates, contemptuous relatives, and a precious few loyal friends—whom Jerri variously insults, betrays, and sexually harasses. Not to mention the incompetent educators, among them the ethically compromised Principal Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon), Mr. Noblet (“Following his violent revolution, Gandhi was devoured by his followers”), and Noblet’s colleague and clandestine lover, the narcissistic art teacher Mr. Geoffrey Jellineck (Dinello).

In the not exactly inevitable film version, Jerri’s immersion into the student body is as high-conceptual as Rodney Dangerfield’s in Back to School (1986) or Adam Sandler’s in Billy Madison (1995). Jerri springs from jail and arrives home to find her mother in an urn, her father in a coma, and a primly malicious stepmother and asinine stepbrother ruling the roost. The family physician (Ian Holm) urges Jerri to help poor Daddy remember a time “when life was precious, and worth being conscious for,” so she returns to Flatpoint High School, the last temple of learning on her prelapsarian travels, where Mr. Noblet, now a born-again Christian science teacher, is assembling a squad for the all-important Science Fair (“Koreans and Jews make the core of the think team”).
The celluloid Strangers with Candy, scripted by Sedaris, Colbert, and Dinello, is being pushed as a prequel to the television series, and so long as it holds to the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) template, it’s aces—the overture summarizes Jerri’s bleak stretch in the slammer through a slow-motion visual dirge of shower-room terror and prison-yard fisticuffs, and Sedaris adds a bit more bulldagger oomph to Jerri’s familiar waddle. Yet despite a formidable line-up of well-assimilated celebrity cameos (Holm, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker), once the thickset plot is in place, the movie begins to taste warmed-over, and not just because of its delayed release date. (Warner Independent Pictures bought the movie at Sundance 2005 but then dropped it due to hazy clearance problems, and THINKFilm subsequently picked up the slack.) Many of the set-ups and some of the dialogue is lifted wholesale from the show, including the movie’s final epigram, which served additional duty as a punch line at this year’s noteworthy White House Correspondent’s Association dinner. And hey, where’s the traditional closing-credits dance party?

Assuming, though, that the movie hasn’t been made solely with fans of the TV program in mind, a major problem with Strangers with Candy is its production values. The show had fluid mise en scène, muscular editing, and unfailingly inventive, cohesive set and costume design that belied its basic-cable budget and tight writing and shooting schedules. Dinello’s direction isn’t dissonant so much as chaotic, not avant-garde so much as avant-technique; his penchant for blurry backs-of-heads in his frames begins to suggest an homage to pirate-DVD auteurs, the editing is flaccid even at sub-90 minutes, and the climactic stage performance is incomprehensible. The writing flags, too: the movie lacks the elegant symmetry of an average episode (the redemptive lesson, for instance, is a virtual non sequitur), and the pile-up of meta-racism toward movie’s end leaves an unwelcome whiff of the Sarah Silvermans.

Still, even the scattershot last half-hour has its moments (none of which your correspondent will spoil), and the film reveals Sedaris yet again as an extraordinary performer. The entertainment-industrial complex presumably has no idea how to process her, but there’s plenty of brilliant weirdos making bank on the big screen—granted, none of them women—and Sedaris & Jerri deserve their own School of Rock (2003) or Bad Santa (2003) or Zoolander (2001) or Anchorman (2004). Jerri Blank is in Sedaris’ blood, bones, and nerve endings—the character’s odd pathos derives not least from how completely Sedaris has metabolized this exotic creature. Maybe Strangers with Candy the movie is stubbornly endearing because it shares its flaws in common with its heroine. Like Jerri, it’s a little hard-used, a little stretched out, and it smells a little funny.

—Jessica Winter

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