Strange Breed

Blank stare: Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) returns to Flatpoint High in the film Strangers With Candy. Courtesy ThinkFilm/Warner Bros. Entertainment.

On a trip to New York a couple of summers ago, I took what I call “the Amy Sedaris tour.” I visited Mary’s Fish Camp, a seafood restaurant in Greenwich Village where it was rumoured the actress still occasionally worked. (In one of her bios, she calls herself an “acclaimed career waitress who occasionally writes and performs when her schedule permits.”) Sedaris wasn’t around that day, but her pals Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker did come in and lunch at the neighbouring table. Later, after some hopeful ambling in the Village — maybe Amy will be down this street! — I stopped for dessert at Joe. The coffee shop sells Sedaris’s homemade cupcakes, and eating them was a weirdly intimate delight.

I related this anecdote to Sedaris during a recent phone interview on the topic of her new film, Strangers with Candy. “Keep going, keep going,” she said, enjoying the flattery. It was hardly the response you’d expect from a celebrity encountering a potential stalker, but Sedaris seems accustomed to obsessive fans. What she’s unaccustomed to is press junkets. She seems extremely tired during our talk; her trademark wit is strangely absent. While polite to a fault, she is clearly unused to the rigours of celebrity; this is the first junket she has ever participated in. While Sedaris is an expert at giving interviews — her regular guest appearances on The Late Show are the only reason to watch Letterman these days — you sense this isn’t a routine she’s eager to fall into.

Sedaris is a Renaissance woman of a very eccentric stripe. An alumnus of Chicago’s famed Second City (where she met collaborators Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert), her most visible mainstream role to date has been a recurring character on Sex and the City — Carrie Bradshaw’s man-eating publisher. Sedaris has also had bit parts in movies like Elf, Maid in Manhattan and Bewitched. “Usually the thing I do in a film is the thing that gets cut out,” Sedaris says. “Luckily, then I don’t have to read the whole [script]. It’s so hard for me to read a script. I don’t understand them.”

That self-deprecation aside, Sedaris does have a remarkable gift for written comedy. Her brother is best-selling humorist David Sedaris, and the two have collaborated on and performed in numerous award-winning plays under the name the Talent Family. This fall, she’ll publish her second book, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. She also contributes a droll advice column to hipster literary mag The Believer. Addressing readers who worry that their back hair may be a turnoff, Sedaris wrote, “Unfortunately, unless your significant other can find a way to become inexplicably attracted to a hideously hirsute neander-freak of nature, you are s--- out of luck.”

The basis for Sedaris’s cult following, however, is the now-defunct sitcom Strangers with Candy. (All 30 episodes of the show, which ran from 1999 to 2000, were recently gathered in a DVD box set.) In Strangers, Sedaris played Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old ex-junkie, ex-con and ex-prostitute (and self-identified “boozer, user and loser”) who decides to return to the high school from which she failed to graduate. Flatpoint High, however, is a cesspool of bigoted, incompetent teachers and cretinous students. Jerri, for her part, is alternately depraved and sweet, rabidly libidinous (she swings both ways) and blithely manipulative.

Without the overbite: Actress Amy Sedaris. Photo by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images.

In real life, Sedaris is a petite and comely 45-year-old. She plays Jerri, however, as a grotesque, thick-thighed avatar of bad taste, equipped with a bizarre array of facial tics, a helium-filled voice and an overbite to rival Freddie Mercury’s. The character’s look and backstory was based on ‘70s motivational speaker Florrie Fisher, herself an ex-hooker and former drug addict. Jerri is an extraordinary comic creation, comparable to Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor on crystal meth or Jiminy Glick as played by Ruth Buzzi.

Directed by Dinello, Strangers with Candy the film is a prequel to the show that depicts how Jerri ended up back at Flatpoint. The opening sequence, a riotous collection of set pieces that the film never tops, shows Jerri reminiscing about her prison time — halcyon days of shower sex, prison-yard hijinks and stabbings. Once out of the joint, Jerri returns home to find her birth mother dead, and in her place a beastly stepmother and stepbrother. Meanwhile, Jerri’s bad behaviour has put her beloved father in a coma. A doctor (Ian Holm) speciously advises Jerri that returning to her adolescent innocence might revive dear old Daddy. “I’ll be the good girl I never was,” Jerry declares.

Every episode of Strangers mimicked an after-school special, with the moralizing platitudes twisted and upended. At Flatpoint, racism reinforces the social order; the mentally ill are considered untrustworthy; drug abuse leads to personal salvation; and anorexia is a great attention-getter. In one episode about bullying, half-wit art teacher Geoffrey Jellinek (played by series co-creator Paul Dinello) advises a group of students that “violence never solves anything except conflicts.” In another episode, Jellinek is the victim of a hit-and-run accident and undergoes an unsuccessful face transplant. (Incidentally, Dinello is Sedaris’s ex-boyfriend, though as she puts it, “I don’t think we ever broke up.”)

While envelope-pushing sitcoms like Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm revel in a gentle sort of amorality, Strangers opted for outright psychosis. “We could do anything in the show,” Sedaris insists. “We didn’t edit ourselves. We wrote what we thought was funny.”

Fans of the series will forgive the film’s irregular rhythm and sloppy production values if only to bask again in Jerri’s toxic presence. Upon returning to Flatpoint, she teams up with a couple of other misfits in order to win the science fair, reasoning that an academic triumph is bound to help her dad’s recovery. But there are others who have much invested in the competition, including history teacher Chuck Noblet (a Galileo-dissing creationist played by Stephen Colbert); Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon), the school’s swaggering, corrupt principal; and Noblet’s nemesis, Robert Beekman, a slick, turtlenecked science teacher played by, yes, Matthew Broderick. Broderick is joined by a number of other celebs, including Sarah Jessica Parker (a burnt-out guidance counsellor with a tip jar) and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a school board official. The film climaxes with the students showcasing their projects in a hilarious musical number that would turn Busby Berkeley’s stomach.

Out to lunch: Jerri Blank makes a new friend in the high school cafeteria. Courtesy ThinkFilm/Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Sedaris doesn’t divulge any comedic influences. While she admits respect for Dave Chappelle, she says, “I prefer to be inspired by drama and tragedy.” Even so, Strangers with Candy possesses the anarchic spirit of early John Waters movies like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble. The film, like the show, is relentlessly inappropriate, but with a particular and defiant affection for the ugly, the weird, the freakish. (Sedaris has said the show was expressly made for misfits and outcasts.) Strangers with Candy is often grimy, raunchy and scabrous, but also refreshingly honest, original, even, at times, tender. Sedaris’s great gift — and one of the reasons for her ever-growing fan base — is her willingness to make the homely beautiful and the beautiful homely, starting with herself. “You’re only as ugly as we think you are,” Noblet tells Jerri when she wants to run for homecoming queen, a sentiment that sums up this most anti-authoritarian of shows.

After its premiere at Sundance in 2005, the film’s release was stalled due to various distribution snafus. For Sedaris, the whole Strangers with Candy concept feels like ancient history. She still loves playing Jerri, but she doesn’t exactly love talking about her. “It’s hard, because when people get their hands on a comedian, they ask them all these serious questions, and you’re just like, ‘Look man, I just want to go out and play.’”

She’s currently consumed with finishing her next project. I Like You is a lavishly illustrated guide to something that Sedaris takes very seriously: home entertaining, done her way. “It may not be the proper way,” she says, “or the most traditional, or even legal, but it works for me.” The book is full of tips on hosting various kinds of parties, with recipes, advice on games and attire and arts-and-crafts ideas. All of it is tongue in cheek, but also practical. Sedaris suggests hosting blind dates at home, but advises not to ask difficult questions like, “Does the sun make noise?”, “How do you teach hope?” or “When can we see each other again?”

Sedaris is delighted when I tell her I’ve tried her Greek salad recipe. “The pine nuts are great when you put them on hot,” she says. The remark would have been perfectly innocent if the voice didn’t sound so much like Jerri Blank.

Strangers with Candy opens July 21 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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