At the same time, the series manages to be as skeptical as Candide without Voltaire's righteous anger simmering just below the ironic froth. The trick is to assume that we will identify with Jerri not despite everything that's repellent about her, but because of those things. This makes the show bright and bouncy, even while Jerri's rankness allows Sedaris and her crew to conjure a nightmare version of our memories of that age (when, for instance, a teacher intercepts Jerri's note and reads it out loud to the class: "My vagina is on fire. I'm trying not to scratch it, Orlando, I'm afraid it'll get infected.").

Clearly, this identification is not served up with the usual cynical-naïve pathos. When the popular girls in gym class pick a student with two broken arms over Jerri for their basketball team, we are not asked to shed a tear. In fact, the makers know how to cauterize pathos by mimicking the emphatic techniques Hollywood uses to wring salt water from us. But neither is the irony affectlessly inflicted on the characters as it is in Todd Solondz's Palindromes (2004). Instead, we observe Jerri with detachment from the outside while at the same time identifying with her — in all her near-worthlessness — from the inside. Jerri's grotesque appearance, speech, and behavior expressionistically externalize how we fear people — justly — view us. In this sense, the identification with Jerri tickle-tortures a silent confession out of anyone who responds to the show.

At their simplest, the series and movie exploit the fact that Jerri brings to the typical experiences of a high school freshman not just the outlook of a middle-aged woman, but her anytime-anywhere taste for drugs and sex as well. (Sex with boys and girls — as she puts it with attempted worldliness, "I like the pole and the hole.") And all of this is inflected with the adaptations she's made on the street and in prison. For instance, her answer to a fresh-faced fellow student who asks what Jerri considers an obvious question is, "Does a pimp carry a razor?" The girl gives what she considers an obvious answer, i.e., that she doesn't know, and Jerri sets her straight: "Trust me — they all do."

The character is more intricately knotted than that, however. Jerri would like to do better, provided it takes no effort, but she's got too little to work with. She's both stupid and ignorant, unable, for instance, to read the movie's title before it disappears from the screen. (She's a blank that can't be filled in.) Moreover, she is guilty of all categories of vice — victimless, petty, felonious, and moral — even when indulging a vice is self-defeating. (When a friend asks whether she's thinking of signing up for the science fair, Jerri replies, "No, I'm thinkin' about pussy. Science fair's for queers.") In the mooshy uplifter The Enchanted Cottage (1945), a disfigured serviceman and a homely woman fall in love and in that magic cottage they can see each other for what they "really" are underneath their imperfect surfaces. In Strangers With Candy, by contrast, Jerri's lack of external beauty only masks her lack of inner beauty.