Strangers with Candy: Dreams on the Rocks Rewatch

September 3, 2016 4:59 AM - Season 1, Episode 3

Jerri is cast as the lead in her school's production of Raisin in the Sun. Her stepmom is consumed with jealousy.
posted by duffell (3 comments total)

A bit of an off-episode for me, honestly, but the delivery of the line "She's going through menopause... with a hint of epilepsy... she's diabetic" kills me every time. And of course, the scene where Jellineck is casting for the play is funny in that "painfully close to home" kind of way.
posted by duffell at 6:15 AM on September 3, 2016

I felt that it was a bit off as well, in part because I don't think that people who haven't been through addiction and recovery themselves are very good at making alcoholism funny. For example, the scene where they're in some alternate version of Al-Anon, having it in the basement of a bar is kind of funny, but the whole thing with Blackman asking for a place to stay just has me wondering how a high school principal has neither the money nor the friends (or even colleagues) to handle that. But the parts concerning the play really are funny; the bit at the beginning that Jerri is watching on TV has absolutely nothing to do with the play or 1961 film (which did star Sidney Poitier), and in the DVD commentary, Stephen Colbert notes that there was an all-white production of the play in a high school in Maine that had no black students at all. (The DVD commentary, which has Colbert, Sedaris and Dinello, can be fun, if sometimes a bit cryptic; they start to talk about something about the personal life of the actor who plays the male lead in the play (Jacob Pitts, who I guess is best known for some role on Justified), but then they say that they can't talk about it. Aggravating!)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:26 PM on September 3, 2016

I love Colbert's Shakespearean reading of Langston Hughes.

"A cup of rum cake. We ran out of flour."
posted by rhizome at 9:18 AM on September 18, 2016