The character is inconsistent — eager for success yet incapable of applying herself; arriving at lessons though unable to grasp a concept or stick to it; vulnerable to insult and exclusion yet lacking in tact, generosity, and compassion; aggressive with street confidence yet mostly the loser in confrontations. She's inconsistent but not incoherent. For instance, in the movie some cool girls make fun of Jerri as she approaches the school for the first time all over again. Jerri, trying to pass along the pain, immediately makes fun of a boy in the same way; when he walks up to her angry and hurt, however, she asks him hopefully if he wants to carry her books for her. In other words, the writing team has replicated in a raunchy cartoon how the chaos of our experience correlates more than we may care to admit to the chaos of our personalities.

What underlies Jerri's mad grab-bag of traits is a fundamental and unmitigated self-absorption. When a teacher chides, "Does everything have to be about you, Jerri?" she replies, "Well, I may not be much, but I'm all I think about." Jerri's not alone: there isn't a teacher or administrator with a vocation for his work (or even a basic competence in his subject). In the movie, as soon as Jerri enters the office of school grief counselor Peggy Callas (Sarah Jessica Parker, fitting her virtuosic sense of gesture and timing to the material), the woman blurts out, "Oh, God, it never ends." At the end of the abbreviated session, she blandly accepts Jerri's lunch money as a mandatory "tip." The parents are no better; there isn't one who could be trusted to put his child's needs ahead of his own desires — always excepting Jerri's father, who's in a coma.

Taken together, the series and movie put folly, self-indulgence, and corruption on display as panoramically as Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Fight Between Carnival and Lent, except that there's not even a corner of the vision dedicated to a meaningful spiritual authority. Strangers With Candy reposes so little faith in our aspirations that life becomes one extended example of comic bathos. The makers see our species as worse than it is and laugh nevertheless, infectiously; not laughing in response would, if anything, make you more like the characters rather then less.

Of course, this kind of irony doesn't present the whole truth. Rather, it's intended as a counterweight to the countless romances that glamorize or gloss over unpleasant facts and intractable problems, and that spin fantasies of accomplishment for us to project ourselves into. Even given its extreme bias, irony like Strangers With Candy can be more honest than such romances, and more recognizable. At the same time, insofar as Strangers With Candy is comic irony, it favors impact over plausibility, shocking us by assuming our identification with the loser-protagonist as she fails in ways that are depicted with no quarter for taboos or sensitivities.