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.
At the same time, the dialogue is as imitable as in any comedy in recent memory (e.g., Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006], Napoleon Dynamite [2004], Romy and Michele's High School Reunion [1997], and Clueless [1995]). The writers have a low-comic genius that also involves brain-teasing wording like nothing I've ever heard. In the series, for instance, Mr. Noblet asks a question so incomprehensible that his students fail their midterm exam before taking it simply by raising their hands. (If you want to see line-crossing low comedy without wit, and that's syrupy despite its irony, rent Another Gay Movie [2006].)
Other neat tricks include the way the teachers confuse the students' interests with their own. When Mr. Noblet insists on grooming Jerri as a concert violinist, he tells her, "I am the only one who can help you realize my dreams of yours." There's also the way the characters lie, transparently, to evade the consequences of their behavior (e.g., "I wasn't pushing you away, I was pulling me toward myself"), or the way they say what they mean without exactly meaning to (e.g., "Look, there's a really ugly rumor I'm about to start, and I want to make sure I've got it right"). This last is an especially important verbal component of the show's nightmarish quality. And the nightmare never ends because these verbal and mental contortions infect your thinking and speech. When my boyfriend recently answered an accusation with, "Believe me, if I had done it, I would be the first to not admit it," I knew he had a dose as bad as mine. (And I believed him.)
Strangers With Candy has a lot more going on in it than the very funny Borat, another movie expanded from its star's TV work. As the whole world (including several courts of law) now knows, in Borat, the Englishman Sacha Baron Cohen plays the eponymous Kazakh TV news anchor who comes here to make a documentary about America for the benefit of his homeland. Cohen's m.o., perfected on Da Ali G Show, is to speak to people on camera who don't know he's putting them on and get so outrageous that the interviewees either figure it out, make asses of themselves, or get so angry they end the conversation. (It's like the premise of Allen Funt's Candid Camera pushed right up to the point of deceit, harassment, assault, and battery.) In the movie, Borat and his producer travel cross-country from New York, which enables Cohen to patch together the most successful of these stunts in an ironic version of a quest romance. (Initially his quest is for "cultural learnings" but then switches to a pursuit for the hand of "virginal" Pamela Anderson.)
Article comments
1 - Alan Dale
you have not said it in ways i thought you never could, bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! your B.F.
2 - Al Barger
Hey, that's some outstanding writing, Mr Dale. I watched just one or two episodes of the series, but this definitely has me interested in seeing the feature film.
3 - Alan Dale
Lee Siegel alert: that top e-mail is, in truth, from the B.F. He's not a computer wiz and so he used my log-on without realizing that it would make it look as if I had attempted to comment on my own writing under a pseudonym. Sorry for any confusion.
4 - Alan Dale
Thank you, Mr. Barger for your comment. I'm thrilled that it has made you want to check the movie out. (Remember, though, I was quoting from the series as well as the movie.) SWC has turned me into a combination of St. Paul and Typhoid Mary--I want everyone to succumb, for their own good.
5 - Hobokamp
Now that was the most thoroughly in-depth review of SWC that I have ever seen! Bravo, well done. You really "get" what they were putting out there. What seems simple and sometimes bizarre on the surface unfolds nicely into a strangely insightful comment on society once you scratch the surface, right? Thanks for the great read-hope Amy, Paul and Stephen all get a chance to see it.
6 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Hobokamp. (Or is that spelled V-I-C-T-O-R-Y?) I totally agree that the show seems simple and bizarre on the surface, but reveals a totally coherent vision underneath. The only thing I would alter is that SWC strikes me as going deeper than social commentary. It dramatizes the lowest estimate of what we humans are, in ourselves. If you know how to send the review to the SWC, please do. Thanks again.
7 - Michael J. West
So if I found the TV show stale, clumsy, and unfunny--which I did--will the movie change my mind?
8 - Erin
What a pleasure to read this in-depth analysis of my favorite show. To those who find it stale & unfunny - you haven't watched it enough. Amy Sedaris does deserve a nomination for Best Actress.
Mr. Dale, I would love to see your review of my favorite audiobook, "Wigfield."
9 - Alan Dale
Dear Michael, I doubt the movie will change your mind. No accounting for taste! Thanks for writing.
10 - Alan Dale
Hey Erin, Thanks for the comment. It's hard for those of us on the other side of the SWC mirror to realize that some people might not like what they see. I have the disease and I don't want the cure! I doubt that further viewing will contaminate someone as resistant as Michael seems to be, however. I'll have to check Wigfield out.