Sedaris gives the most staggering female slapstick performance in the exaggerated, creepy-frantic Keystone vein in movie history, and with more tang than any Keystone comedienne ever had. As Jerri, Sedaris embodies an ironic view of human nature that borders on a revelation of the horror of total hopelessness but then turns that glimpse of horror back into all-out burlesque. With the series and now the movie, Sedaris has become the all-time queen of the one-dimensional, so-bleak-it's-comic visionary. (For my money, she gave the most unforgettable performance by a lead actress in 2006, edging out even Judi Dench, who in Notes on a Scandal finally gave the astonishing performance she has repeatedly been credited with.)

The movie wisely retains almost the entire supporting cast from the series, and Stephen Colbert as the teacher Chuck Noblet is a close rival as a mime to Sedaris. He does split-second 180s, emotional as well as physical, and on a broad scale, windmilling his limbs like a baseball pitcher. But he does more than invent the body language of an unfit, rebarbative teacher; he creates a character who compensates for his inability to conceal anything effectively with a lightning ability to put the other person in the wrong. And he does all this while nailing the over-explicitness of bad acting in bad scripts, yet without setting himself apart from the movie. Currently, Colbert is da man when it comes to multi-level fakery.

Paul Dinello as the art teacher Geoffrey Jellinek (who is involved in a "secret" relationship with Chuck) lacks Colbert's pantomimic boldness and precision, but has distinct assets of his own. He's the best practitioner of false modesty since Harvey Korman and has one of those cracking voices that everybody loves in '30s comedians. Dinello also effortlessly sends up a narcissism so blatant and dopey that both compassion and anger are kept at bay. (And he has a phenomenal bod, too little seen.) Geoffrey's self-love is believable for a gay man but the jokes feel more inside than the average fag joke. You are way free to laugh.

As Jerri's wicked stepmother Sarah Blank, Deborah Rush has a brittle delivery that adds a high-comic exactness to the proceedings. (Her voice also cracks on cue.) The poise with which she combines her suburban hostessliness and her dislike of Jerri is matchlessly poisonous. Rush, who was particularly memorable in Compromising Positions (1985) and Family Business (1989), maintains her high-comic, needle-prick adroitness even when she asks Jerri in front of her new, popular school friend whether she wiped her ass on the bathroom towels. Finally, Gregory Hollimon as the openly and even criminally self-serving principal Onyx Blackman reads his lines with a gusty delivery that gives the man an authority that is both formidable and hollow.

I don't want to claim too much for the movie. I am not, however, asserting that the people behind Strangers With Candy intentionally put everything I've written about it into the show and movie. It's clear from the group interview at the Museum of Television and Radio, included on disk 4 of the complete series DVD, that they were aware of the ground rules by which they played, but both the series and the movie are so good because those rules fully express the group's ironic intuitions. These are people who know how to stay in their lane while relentlessly chasing laughs.