Strangers with Candy characters

This is a list of characters from the Comedy Central original program Strangers with Candy.

Geraldine Antonia "Jerri" Blank (Amy Sedaris) was born in 1953 to a drunken Aramapu squaw, who traded her for a pitcher of beer. She was adopted by Guy Blank and his wife, whom she believes to be her real mother. In 1967, Jerri dropped out of high school and ran away from home. During her absence, her adoptive mother died and her father married a second wife, Sara, who is around Jerri's own age. Around 1984, Jerri was living in Florida, where she was beaten by a border guard and lost a tooth. That same year, she became pregnant by either an obese, harelipped bail bondsman or a Cuban. She gave birth to a child, Ricky (Fred Koehler), whom she traded for a guitar. She claims to have had several other pregnancies, all of which were aborted, or possibly miscarried, considering her drug addiction. She served several prison sentences, most recently because she, as worded in the introduction, “stole the TV”. In 1999, Jerri returned to Flatpoint and re-enrolled in high school at the age of 46.

She is openly racist, though she appears to be completely oblivious to this fact. For example, she denied any racism to her friend Paul Cotton immediately before showing him her heavily stereotyped drawing of a "Chinaman". She often compares her Filipino friend Orlando to a monkey, although her remarks aren’t meant to cause offense (she thinks monkeys are adorable). She also makes randomly anti-Semitic remarks, which are curious because she doesn't know any Jewish people. At one point, she feels compelled to apologize to her diary for being racist to it. Jerri's bigotry is always presented as an example of her stupidity and ignorance, and she has never been violent towards any of the minority groups she insults; however, in the twisted, valueless world of the show, her views are never really contradicted or punished, and she is inevitably allowed to carry on with her behavior. The show's storylines also provide her with many opportunities to be insensitive to other groups, such as the blind and the disabled.

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