by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I’m always doing it, in and out,” says Amy Sedaris. Hmm? “I’ll just do it once or twice a week, if I can. Go in, make $300 and leave—it’s perfect. It involves the public, and I like that.”

Sedaris isn’t a prostitute, but she played a reformed junkie whore on TV. She’s talking about waitressing, a lucrative hobby she always seems to find time for, between writing and starring in TV shows and plays with the likes of Stephen Colbert and her novelist brother David Sedaris, playing bit parts in shows and movies like Sex and the City and Elf, appearing on Letterman over 10 times in five years, penning articles for The New Yorker and other magazines, running the Crafty Beavers craft club out of her apartment, selling homemade cupcakes and cheeseballs to New York cafés and grocery stores, and volunteering at a rabbit-rescue shelter. She’s also “an honorary educator of the House Rabbit Society.” Her mini-rex is named Dusty. Her imaginary boyfriend is named Ricky.

There’s a touch of Andy Kaufman in Amy Sedaris, and not just because he worked as a busboy while he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live and Taxi. Kaufman’s ugly, obnoxious, womanizing alter ego Tony Clifton is a less likable male counterpart to Sedaris’s Jerri Blank, the 47-year-old former heroin/alcohol/sex fiend and returning high school student she portrays in Strangers With Candy.

“I brought her to life with my fatty suit and my expression and my physical humour,” says Sedaris. Unlike Kaufman, she doesn’t slip into character in real life, though she’s been known to wear other disguises, upsetting strangers, with candy—she applies fake bruises and spits out mouthfuls of Tic Tacs like busted teeth.

Flatpoint follies

Jerri Blank exists exclusively within the warped world of the late ’90s Comedy Central TV show and its new big-screen prequel, co-starring Sedaris’s co-writers, Colbert and Paul Dinello, as a closeted pair of teachers. The film, directed by Dinello and funded by David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, depicts Blank’s awkward transition from jail to home life to Flatpoint High, where she enters the state science fair to impress and maybe even awaken her father, who slipped into a coma when she ran away 32 years earlier.

Over its 30-episode run, from 1998–2000, the TV show earned a cult following, attracting guest stars such as Winona Ryder, Janeane Garafalo, David Cross and assorted Saturday Night Live alumni—the film features Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sir Ian Holm and Dan Hedaya in bit parts. Aside from the twisted comedic energy of its writers and stars, Strangers With Candy’s charm lies in its satire of gauzy after-school specials from the ’70s and ’80s, and their adult, contemporary counterpart, schmaltzy TV movies on the U.S. cable channel, Lifetime.

“It’s the same feeling,” says Sedaris, comparing the two unintentionally funny guilty pleasures. “They’re just so lame, so make-believe, just really queer. And they’re just as entertaining to watch.”

Equally influential, specifically on the physical appearance of Jerri Blank, was ’70s motivational speaker Florrie Fisher, a former user, boozer and loser famous for her anti-drug PSAs—look her up on YouTube, where you’ll also find half a dozen episodes of Strangers With Candy.

Hostess with the mostest

Whether fiction or non-fiction, saccharine, clichéd cautionary tales for suckers of all ages make fertile ground for comedy, as Sedaris, Colbert and Dinello discovered during Strangers With Candy’s staggered seven-year creation. The trio met in the ’80s, when they were part of the Second City and Annoyance Theatre ensembles in Chicago, and went on to co-star in a sketch comedy show called Exit 57, which ran for two seasons on Comedy Central in the mid ’90s. When Strangers With Candy was cancelled, they co-wrote a book called Wigfield, a satirical story bout a journalist documenting the dying days of a small town. But Jerri Blank was never far from their minds.

“While we were writing the book, we were coming up with a bunch of funny stuff that Jerri Blank would say, and we’d always write it down. By the time we finished Wigfield, we were like, ‘Hey we have enough here to write a Strangers With Candy movie,’” Sedaris explains. As for her longtime partnership with Dinello and Colbert, “We just clicked. We’ve always found the time to work together, but we’re not a group or anything—we never make plans, it’s just that when something comes up, all of a sudden we’ll involve each other.”

Although there’s no joint project in the works at the moment, both Sedaris and Dinello have appeared on The Colbert Report, Sedaris as a guest earlier this week, and Dinello as a recurring character called Tad. Colbert also contributed a shrimp paste recipe to Sedaris’s upcoming book, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, out in October.

“It’s a very visual book—I’ve got over 2,000 pieces of art in it—but it’s full of practical information. It’s got recipes and a craft section, and suggestions for how to entertain in different situations,” she says. “By [Under the Influence], I mean the old Betty Crocker books and Fanny Farmer. There is a drug chapter, but that’s just about how annoying it is to entertain people on drugs. I mean, when they’re on drugs, or fucked up somehow. That’s pretty hard on a hostess.”

Amy Sedaris hosts the Canadian premiere of Strangers With Candy at the Impérial on saturday, July 15 at 9:30pm, as part of Comedia. Info: www.hahaha.com

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