Strangers with Candy : A Mini-Oral History

Strangers with Candy seems too, well, strange to have ever existed. But somehow the show's creators—Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert—wrung three aggressively weird and hilarious seasons and a movie out of a parody of finger-wagging after-school specials, led by Sedaris's self-described former "junkie whore" Jerri Blank, who repeats high school at age 46. Two decades later, we talked to the (still very odd) friends about what they took away from their stunted, depraved heroine.

In 1988, Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert met at Chicago improv studio Second City. Six years later, Sedaris and Dinello persuaded Colbert to join them in New York to collaborate on Comedy Central sketch show Exit 57.

Paul Dinello (art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck—pronounced the same way as "King Joffrey"): Stephen stayed at a monastery because he had a wife and one child in Chicago.

Stephen Colbert (history teacher Chuck Noblet): I was living at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Chelsea. In the summertime, they didn't have students and you could rent a room. I had hot running water, and I don't mind a religious environment. And it was just super-cheap.

Amy Sedaris (former "junkie whore" Jerri Blank): We were always dragging [Colbert] into stuff.

Colbert: Paul would say, "Hey, do you want to do a show?" It'd be at Stella or Luna. I would say, "Great, yeah." He'd say, "It's tonight." "Paul, it's four o'clock. The show starts at eight." He's like, "Yeah, but we're professional comedy writers. We should be able to come up with something." And I'm like, "From nothing?!" It happened all the time.

The acclaimed 'Exit 57' aired for 12 episodes, before Comedy Central unceremoniously dropped it.

Dinello: Amy was going to go pitch something else to Comedy Central, but Stephen and I were working on something else.

Colbert: Mysteries of the Insane Unknown.

Dinello: It was about guys who would ask, "Are the pyramids actually bomb shelters built by aliens 2,000 years ago?"

Colbert: Comedy Central really liked it. They literally said the words, "Let's cut you guys a check." I'm like, "Fuck yes!" Because we were super unemployed.

Sedaris: I had the idea of doing something based on after-school specials. I grew up with them and they were just so queer—they always told us how we didn't want to be. It's the same with The Brady Bunch—when we'd watch that, it was like, Thank God my parents aren't like that.

Dinello: They're so desperate to teach kids a lesson, but they're the last place an adolescent would go for that.

Colbert: Paul said, "Are you available to come over tonight? Amy is pitching something to Comedy Central tomorrow and wants our help." He explained the idea to me, and I said, "Um, I'm happy to help, but you realize they're going to do her show, not ours? That's a better idea."

Dinello: I said, "Oh, come on, we'll just go support Amy." We pitched Strangers, and they went, "Yeah, we'll do that." They never mentioned our show again.

The first episode of 'Strangers with Candy,' in which Jerri accidentally kills a classmate with the street drug "glint," premiered in April 1999.

Colbert: Amy had a cupcake business. She would be sitting on the floor frosting cupcakes to sell at bakeries and go, "What about…," and have the perfect thing. We'd say, "Say that again," and she'd go, "What did I say?" I mean this as a compliment: She was sort of like the idiot savant.

Sedaris: Sometimes I feel like I'm a deaf person trying to get across an idea, and Paul and Stephen can both look at me and be like, "Oh, this is what she's trying to say."

Dinello: My "aha" moment was when I found that tape of Florrie Fisher [the '60s and '70s motivational speaker who visited high schools to warn students with stories of her past as a heroin addict and prostitute, and who later became a cult icon on VHS].

Sedaris: You got it at Kim's Video in the East Village. She looked like Mike Dukakis. He goes, "I think you should do this woman, and she has the idea that she goes back to high school," and Stephen had the idea that I would learn the wrong lesson. I said, "Okay, she'll be a junkie whore this time." I told the hair and makeup people, "I want to look like a professional golfer," and then I told wardrobe, "I want to look like I own a snake." And that's all I gave them.

Colbert: It's a badge of honor that I served Amy's comedic vision. I could do hack shit for the rest of my life, but I'd go, "Yeah, but I also wrote that stuff."

Sedaris: I always refer to Paul and Stephen as the woodchoppers. And I'm more like a tree decorator. That's the way it is—they organize my chaos.

During their time on 'Strangers,' Sedaris, Dinello, and Colbert were largely left to their own devices by Comedy Central.

Dinello: Sometimes there would be mild pushback. But by the third season, it seemed like no one was watching the store. We'd make some case about we should be allowed to have a woman with pierced labia and a Liberty Bell hanging from it, [executive producer] Kent Alterman would convey the message to the network, and they would usually relent.

Sedaris: They wouldn't let us say "filthy Jew diary," but they would let us say "dirty Jew diary."

Dinello: My memory is there was only one thing that they censored.

Colbert: To be beautiful on the inside, Jerri has to do nice things for other people, which she has no history of. So she finds an albino who's a destitute bum on the street, and then a dwarf, who seems perfectly happy. She brings the dwarf into school, and the hobo albino gets it in his head that he's going to sell the dwarf for drug money. He goes, "That's a good-looking dwarf," then grabs the dwarf and runs away. [Colbert begins laughing hysterically.] She yells, "Stop! Help! That albino stole my dwarf!"

Dinello: They objected to that, for some reason.

Colbert: I said, "But we've already hired the albino and the little person!"

In ‘Strangers’’ 30th and final episode, aired on October of 2000, Flatpoint High School is set to be turned into a strip mall. Jerri and others demolish the school in a reference to 'Strip Mall,' the series that replaced 'Strangers' on Comedy Central.

Dinello: It was the kind of thing where no one was refilling the snack drawer. We would call them and say, "Are you guys picking up the show? Are you canceling it?" And they'd go, "We don't know what you're talking about."

Sedaris: After he left Comedy Central, [executive Doug Herzog] said, "I showed everybody [the Strangers with Candy] pilot. I'm looking for a show like it." Then he started doing that show with the guy—what's his name, Cranston? So that show was Malcolm in the Middle, which I never even saw.

Colbert now hosts 'The Late Show,' for which Dinello is a supervising producer, and Sedaris stars on truTV's Martha Stewart parody 'At Home with Amy Sedaris.' But Jerri Blank lives on.

Dinello: Something will happen and Stephen is like, "I wish Jerri were here to comment on this." Whenever something unfiltered needs to be said. That's what I liked most about her—she was just an animal.

Colbert: We used to call her the Teflon trout—she's swimming downstream of life and nothing adheres to her. At the end of every day, she's clearly learned nothing. There's a lot of Jerri in The Colbert Report. He was well-intentioned, just incredibly poorly informed and guided.

Dinello: Maybe that's why people like Trump. In society, you're handcuffed a bit, but you admire that people say whatever's going through their heads without worrying about the repercussions. That thoughtlessness comes off as honesty.

Sedaris: She's an innocent in a lot of ways. She's desperate to be loved. Deep down, there's a little bit of Jerri in everyone.

This story originally appeared in the June 2018 Comedy issue with the title "They Were Weird Before Weird Was Cool."