Shows:

"Strangers With Candy" (Comedy Central)

THEY SAY tragedy plus distance equals comedy, which explains Life is Beautiful, Dan Quayle's presidential bid, and most high school reunions. But the formula is not foolproof -- witness "Strangers with Candy," Comedy Central's new series about Jerri Blank, a 42-year-old addict and ex-con who decides go back to high school (Flatpoint High, home of the Concrete Donkeys).

Much has already been made of the series' straightforward embrace of all the things children are taught to avoid, and its rejection of everything we were supposed to learn. Its overarching caveat is that for all her chronological maturity, Jerri has learned few of life's lessons -- indeed, seems barely able to dress herself. In buck teeth and a bad haircut, clothed in fringed jeans and a vest, Jerri returns to high school even more of an outcast than when she left; just as eager as she ever was to fit in and just as clueless as to why she doesn't. (Inviting her class to a party, she tempts them with this singular cry: "There's going to be hot fruit!")

To be sure, there is humor to be had here: In the first episode, Jerri attempts to make friends by mixing up a homemade hallucinogen she calls "Glimt," also known as "The Devil's Hairlip." And as a premise, "Strangers with Candy" benefits from both cultural momentum and blindingly obvious source material. Adolescent reinventions of our current escapist fantasy of choice (N.B. Never Been Kissed, She's All That) abound, and high school itself has become a kind of all-purpose moral tableaux -- from the large-type Shakespeares running slipshod over the multiplex to "Dawson's Creek." And as for skewering the saccharine morality plays of after school specials, well, the only real surprise is that it hasn't been done before.

YET FOR all the richness of its targets, the show is curiously flat -- a broad parody whose sharpest moments stem from social non-sequitors and squeamishly inappropriate one-liners, as when Jerri announces: "I have to leave class early -- I'm getting my uterus scraped." Perhaps flatness is to be expected, as the show's creators (Amy Sedaris, who plays Jerri, Stephen Colbert, formerly of "The Daily Show," Paul Dinello and Mitch Rouse) are veterans of "alternative comedy," a genre whose distinguishing characteristic is that it is rarely, you know, funny. Sedaris in particular has made a career out of humor that doesn't make you chuckle so much as it makes you really, really uncomfortable. David Sedaris, her brother and sometimes-collaborator, has written about her performance art-like approach to family gatherings, as when she upset their appearance-obsessed dad by wearing a thigh-enhancing "fatty suit" (she also wears it on the show). Perhaps more pointedly, there's also the story about her preparing for a magazine photo-shoot by asking the make-up artist to make it look like she had been "beaten up bad." Taking to the streets afterwards, she'd respond to people's questions about her injuries by simply telling them "I'm in love! Can you believe it? I'm finally in love!"

Now, that's a funny story, but is it a funny thing to say? In recollection -- and understanding that the bruises aren't real--it's an easy laugh, but Sedaris' real (and demented) genius was that she meant it to be funny then. Like MTV’s abrasive auteur Tom Green, Sedaris mines for comedy that point where all of our social skills fail us, that moment when we are confronted with a situation so aggressively amoral, bizarre, or maybe just plain gross that we have no idea what to do.

"Strangers with Candy" is an entire series built around creating exactly such moments -- so of course it's set in a high school. Where else are the social networks stretched so thin, the rawness of human reaction to uncomfortable situations so close to the surface? Yet "Strangers with Candy" doesn't pay much attention to the way real people might react to its manic audacity -- the actors are deadpan enough to be considered autistic (in fact, one of the show's running gags is that Jerri's father is in a state of permanent catatonia. Ha. Ha.).

SO FAR, critics have mostly responded to the show's supposed "outrageousness," though anyone who still thinks drug references and abortion jokes are "outrageous" must have stopped watching TV when the real After School Specials went off the air. Almost universally, it's been hailed as a future "cult hit," a phrase that should generally be translated as "I didn't get it." In truth, the show’s most daring move is to proceed into rather unrealiable comic territory without the benefit of a laughtrack.

And while the lack of a laughtrack is by no means completely unique (it's one of "Futurama's" few saving graces), "Strangers with Candy's" dependence on awkwardness, its recollection of moments when you don't know if you should laugh, makes its absence more pronounced. Someone once called "Beavis and Butthead" the first "meta-comedy" -- a show whose humor stemmed from laughing at the people who would laugh at that kind of humor. "Strangers with Candy" inverts this proposition: it's a show whose humor stems from not laughing at people who aren't laughing.

Ana Marie Cox is a writer in San Francisco and a contributing editor at Mother Jones.

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