As a teenager in North Carolina, Amy Sedaris found herself gravitating toward the outcasts at her high school. “I would go right to them or they would come right to me,” she says. “If somebody called me up and they were depressed or needed to talk, I would have all the patience in the world to listen to them. I’d never make fun of them or judge them in any way.”

That’s a peculiar thing to hear from a woman who makes her living as a comedy writer and performer. Doesn’t mocking people come with the territory? But if you consider her work—which includes books, TV shows, movies, and dozens of plays—it makes perfect sense. During the past decade, she’s created a repertoire of characters that’s like a roll call of human misery. There’ve been teenage girls with slashed faces (Stitches), welfare moms forced to perform for food (One Woman Shoe), elderly and mildly retarded derelicts (Wigfield), filthy donkeys with a penchant for rape (Incident at Cobbler’s Knob), and probably the only junkie whore ever to star in her own after-school special (Strangers with Candy).