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Gays can especially associate with Jerri's funniest defense mechanism, her wicked tongue. She's like a really savvy, acid-tongued drag queen. It's a treat to sit back and watch her tear into her tormentors.

As with many queers, Jerri's closest friends are other high-school outcasts. She learns to make alliances with student “geeks” and with teens of other ethnic backgrounds. Through their shared ordeal of being “different”, they manage to target and lambaste all the cruelty around them.

On the flip side, Jerri is infamous in the way she mocks GLBT political correctness. She offers vulgar lesbian come-on's toward the other girls in school. She hurls crude “faggot” put-downs at nearly all the boys around her.

On the surface, this might seem insulting to queers. Yet somehow Jerri's gay shtick is so idiotic as to be self-deprecating in a disarmingly funny way. Her tart “fag” and “dyke” humor functions like an “in-joke” for gay and lesbian audiences. She plays devil's advocate in exemplifying how queers are often falsely perceived.

As for Strangers' actual plot, it functions as a prequel to the TV version. Thus even those familiar with the TV series will find new background information on both its storyline and its wacky cast of characters.

As the film begins we meet Jerri for the first time. She is just returning home after 32 years as a runaway and prison convict. (The hilarious, slow motion “woman behind bars” montage shown over the film's opening credits had the screening audience in stitches right from the very start).

Ex-con Jerri returns to the Ozzie & Harriet type middle-America home of her childhood only to find she is completely estranged from everyone now living there. It turns out that during Jerri's 32-year absence, her mother died. Her father remarried and with his new wife had a son. He then slipped into a coma.

Jerri has to deal with a new, unfriendly stepmother, a new, antagonistic younger brother, and a dad who is only there physically. Thus Strangers with Candy is a kind of very twisted, fractured-fairy tale retelling of the Cinderella story.

Once it's established that Jerri is the unwanted prodigal daughter of her family and hometown, the film's plot begins to thicken. As explained in the SWC press release:

“Wracked with guilt…Jerri decides to turn a new leaf to hopefully snap him (her dad) back to reality, so she picks up her life exactly where she left-off, as a high school freshman. She soon discovers that high school isn't much different from prison, and is loaded with problems and temptations that are especially difficult to resist for a not particularly selective former boozer, user, and loser.”

Shunned and picked-on by classmates, teachers, and parents, Jerri discovers in her school's annual science project competition the perfect opportunity for vindication. If she can only win it, she just might be able to kick-start her comatose dad back into everyday conscious life. (Just how this miracle would actually happen is never explained in the film).

In winning the science prize she might also finally gain the respect and friendship of everyone at school. She might even land a hot date in the process.

Jerri teams up with other classmate losers, nerds and outcasts to form an underdog science team. But there is considerable competition for the prize. Can Jerri and her friends possibly hope to win over the more popular, advanced students?

Strangers with Candy is, more than anything, a star-turn for supreme film clown Amy Sedaris. She has become so associated with the character of Jerri Blank that it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. As Paul Ruebens did with his Pee-Wee Herman character, Sedaris often appears in public and on late-night talk shows as Jerri, further blurring any difference between the two.

In fact, when Sedaris spoke to the audience at SWC's Newfest screening on Wednesday, many of her quips and mannerisms were very Jerri indeed. At one point, Sedaris-as-Jerri even provided one of the evening's funniest moments. As the packed house went dark to begin the film, Sedaris tried to reach her seat. Apparently having some trouble finding her way, she struggled to climb over audience members. In a perfect accompaniment to the film's opening credits, everyone in the pitch-black theater heard that signature nervous and whiny voice call out, “Excuuuuuse Me!”

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