The Drug Addict With a Heart of Gold

In one quiet scene in “Strangers With Candy,” Amy Sedaris, playing Jerri Blank, an ex-prostitute and ex-drug user who has returned from a 32 year binge to start her life over as a high-school freshman, repeatedly tries – and fails – to throw popcorn into her own mouth. It is a testament to Ms.Sedaris’s perfect comic control of her body, still graceful under a lumpy fat-suit, that even this simple sequence of wide-eyed, optimistic, and yet hopeless flailing is hilarious. Ms. Sedaris co-wrote the movie, along with her fellow Second City alumni, Stephen Colbert and Paul Dinello (who also directs).The collaborators have clear ideas of each others’ strengths, from Ms. Sedaris’s physical skills to the convoluted intellectual humor of Mr. Colbert’s dialogue – here showing the same talent evidenced in Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”