All-Day Suckers
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment when vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers With Candy that plays like the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird — this is not a Disney Channel joint — tosses a half-eaten banana out a car window and takes a Neil Armstrong step outside. There lies the banana on the sidewalk. Banana? Sidewalk? You can practically hear the Jaws theme. Fifty years ago, she would’ve stepped on the peel and gone ass over teakettle.
But Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), the scraggly 46-year-old heroine, makes it to the curb without incident — her very existence is joke enough. And the banana just lies there, a conspicuous lump of missed opportunity. Something about that banana — a classic sight-gag setup evoked just to be dismissed — typifies the brand of humor that Strangers With Candy represents. Call it anti-comedy: a war zone of thwarted expectations that makes the audience’s uncertainty whether to laugh part of the attack.
The appallingly funny Strangers With Candy is the movie version of a short-lived Comedy Central series that was itself a milestone in creep-out comedy. Granted, shows about the terrors and petty humiliations of high school are as common as acne. The series took a cliché of those old shows — actors who look as old as cafeteria workers — and made it laughably surreal by focusing on Jerri, a grizzled ex-coke whore who attempts a late-life makeover as the world’s crustiest teen queen. If the memory of awkward crushes and tough assignments seems painful, just picture them all happening to Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The movie is the tender tale of how Jerri goes from chasing cell-block bitches to joining the student body of Flatpoint High School. Its biggest laughs come not because of situation or character logic but because of their complete breakdown — and because the ace supporting players can deliver the sneak-attack line readings that the spiky dialogue demands. The funniest of them is series regular Stephen Colbert, who co-wrote the script with Sedaris and director Paul Dinello and here plumbs levels of ironic self-obsession that Garry Shandling couldn’t find. The star cameos range from iffy but game (Allison Janney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the school board) to seamless (the finest five minutes of Sarah Jessica Parker’s career), with Ian Holm’s deadpan doctor perhaps the brightest left-field surprise.
Like the show, it’s a love-it-or-hate-it affair because of its star, Amy Sedaris, whose Lucille Ball-on-crystal-meth persona is an anti-comedy litmus test. Screechy and clingy, possessed of utterly unwarranted sex-bomb bravado, Sedaris’ Jerri is the square peg on which the movie hangs. Either you find her scrunched-up expressions, crack-baby attention span and malignant libido a skin-crawling hoot (as when she sizes up a jock conquest-to-be with the gag-reflex dare “I want your spermies”) or you recoil as from a prom corsage of poison ivy. Either way, no problem. Anti-comedy isn’t pretty.
