Characters / Community: The Study Group

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The Study Group (AKA "The Greendale Seven")

The original main cast of the series.

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In General

From left to right: Abed, Troy, Annie, Pierce, Jeff, Britta, and Shirley

Dean Pelton: Tomorrow, they are having a hearing to investigate the ringleaders of the riot, a.k.a. 'The Greendale Seven.'

Pierce: Catchy. How about Pierce Hawthorne and the Greendale Six?

— "Course Listing Unavailable"

The seven original main characters of Community; a diverse group of outcasts who met after forming a study group for their community college Spanish class.

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• Action Girl: All three of the girls have no trouble handling themselves in the show's more action-heavy segments, though how competent they are exactly tends to fluctuate per the Rule of Funny (note that this also applies to the guys in equal measure).
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: All the girls have this in spades. It's often played with, however.
  • Shirley is devoted to Andre who, after we meet him, is consistently depicted as an otherwise decent man who made a mistake and is trying his best to make up for it, and it's often suggested that for all her initial bitterness toward him Shirley had her own role to play in the break-up of their marriage.
  • Annie's crush on Jeff is often demonstrated to be unhealthy, or at the very least ill-advised, for both of them and she herself acknowledges that it's largely due to issues she has around loneliness and being a bit of a Control Freak who finds the idea of a man completely changing his identity for her appealing.
  • Britta's thing for jerks and weirdos is often deconstructed as being the result of deep-seated self-esteem issues and self-loathing on her part, prompting her to throw herself into disastrous relationships with damaged goods as a subconscious way of validating her own lack of self-worth.
• The Artifact: The study group aren't really students anymore by mid-Season 5 but they're still occasionally called as such.
• Badass Crew: They have, among other things, survived through hellish days-long paintball tournaments, beat up a school bully gang, started a school riot, and rescued their dean with an elaborate heist.
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn:
  • Britta is the Beauty (though she thinks she's Brains), a Dumb Blonde who acts as the self-appointed group therapist.
  • Annie is the Brains, an intelligent overachiever who actually wants to learn things.
  • Shirley is the Brawn, a Mama Bear extraordinaire who is one of the group's heavy hitters in a fight.
• Book Ends: The pilot sees the study group formed when Jeff attempts to get together with Britta. Jeff and Britta end as the last two remaining members of the group at Greendale, after the rest end up moving on in their own ways.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: All of them have their quirks and attitude, but nonetheless get their job(s) well done.
• Characterization Marches On: While traces of how all the characters the audience will be familiar with are present and several of them only slightly different from how they will eventually turn out, there are notable and at times quite significant differences with all of them, especially in the Pilot. Jeff himself even lampshades this in Repilot:
  • Jeff spends most of Season 1 adjusting to being a student compared to the cocky smartass he usually is for most of the show's run. He's also wearing sweatpants in the pilot before eventually becoming The Fashionista.
  • Britta is more of a Straight Man in the first two seasons before settling as a ditzy Soapbox Sadie starting the third.
  • Abed's filmmaking hobby is absent in the first few episodes.
  • It takes Shirley a quarter into Season 1 to firmly settle in her Token Religious Teammate role.
  • Annie is an Academic Alpha Bitch and Aloof Dark-Haired Girl in the first episode before eventually settling in The Cutie role.
  • Troy starts out as a slightly jerkish Dumb Jock before becoming the proud Dork Knight the audience knows him for.
  • Pierce is introduced as a Bourgeois Bohemian Casanova Wannabe before settling as a socially inept Innocent Bigot.
• Daddy Issues: With the exception of Shirley, pretty much all of them have psychological problems that can be stemmed back to their parents.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Jeff either leans closer to "jerk" or "heart of gold" depending on the episode.
  • Britta's level of intelligence.
  • Annie's crush on Jeff can be one-sided or mutual.
    • Her feelings for Jeff seem to range from being genuine to just being in love with Jeff's idea.
  • Troy can either completely indulge Abed in his adventures or be the saner, more responsible voice of reason.
  • Pierce is either a bumbling, relatively harmless old man or an unapologetic Jerkass.
• Dwindling Party: Happens towards the last two seasons. In Season 5, Pierce dies and Troy subsequently starts sailing across the world. In the final season, Shirley departs early on to take care of her sick father while the Grand Finale saw Abed and Annie respectively relocating to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. to start their careers.
  "One by one, they all just fade away."
• Dysfunction Junction: All of them are pretty screwed up in their own ways. Delving into this more as the show went on is a big reason for the Cerebus Syndrome that the later seasons are infamous for.
  • Jeff defines himself by being the best at everything, to the point of repeatedly suffering minor breakdowns when some new development highlights that he's not perfect. He's also got a lot of hang-ups related to being abandoned by his dad at a young age.
  • Britta comes from a Friendless Background that has left her with a crippling lack of self-esteem, which she tries to mask with activism and charity. It's also implied on a couple of occasions that she secretly believes the rest of the study group views her as a killjoy and doesn't want her around.
  • Abed is sufficiently neurodivergent that he often has trouble making sense of the world except through the lens of pop culture. He has enough trouble relating to other people that the study group appears to be the first set of friends who really accepted him. And that's not even getting into the occasional emotional breakdowns where he retreats completely into fantasy to cope with stress.
  • Shirley is shown to struggle with feelings of inadequacy after her divorce, particularly since Andre left her for a much younger woman. She also angsts over fears of getting older and that her closely-held religious faith isn't respected by the rest of the group.
  • Annie had an epically terrible high-school experience capped off by a stay in rehab to deal with her drug addiction, around the same time as being essentially cut off by her parents. She lives alone in a bad neighborhood with barely enough money to get by, and her Control Freak tendencies are largely an attempt to affect positive change in what little aspects of her screwed-up life she can control.
  • Troy is a classical example of a Jaded Washout, initially unable to grow up because he's secretly afraid he'll never improve beyond his high-school football years. The series also makes clear that his very close friendship with Abed is extremely codependent and borderline toxic at times, to the point that both struggle to function without the other.
  • Pierce had a father who was both controlling and emotionally abusive, but who also spoiled him enough that he never developed useful skills. He's been married seven times, the only stepchildren he still sees are the ones he bribes, and he's been going to Greendale for over a decade because it's the only place he feels accepted.
• Everyone Meets Everyone: The pilot involves the formation of the study group and their somewhat disastrous first meeting. This trope is downplayed since Troy and Annie went to high school together, and a later episode reveals that Jeff and Shirley knew each other as kids.
• Family of Choice: It helps that several in the group come from dysfunctional families themselves or are children of divorced parents, and as such, throughout the series, the entire group forms deep, family bonds to the point that the thought of losing the group completely freaks some of them (notably Jeff or Annie) out and they attempt subterfuge in a desperate ploy to keep the group together or remain a part of it. Interestingly, the Team Mom (Shirley) and the closest thing they have to a father figure (Jeff) is one of the opposite-sex pairings with the least Ship Tease.
• Fatal Flaw: Every group member has one. Together they collectively cover the Seven Deadly Sins.
  • Jeff's ego. His body issues push him to make himself into a perfect physical specimen, while his narcissism and desire for control are due to his fragile sense of self-worth. (Pride)
  • Abed's Lack of Empathy and overindulgence in fiction. (Gluttony)
  • Pierce's resentment of the rest of the group and of Jeff in particular. (Envy)
  • Troy's naivety and desire to avoid work and pressure. (Sloth)
  • Britta's self-loathing; she throws herself into self-destructive behaviors out of a desire for approval and acceptance from her peers. (Lust)
  • Shirley's anger, which manifests through her passive-aggression. (Wrath)
  • Annie's pathological need to 'win' at whatever the cost. (Greed)
• Five-Token Band: The study group is rather diverse, not just in terms of race and gender, but also age, religion, and socioeconomic background. Jeff and Britta are white, irreligious late 20's/early 30's characters, while Pierce is elderly, Abed is a neurodivergent Arab Muslim, Troy is a black Jehovah's Witness, Shirley is a black female Christian, and Annie is a white Jewish woman who recovered from addiction. They are later "joined" by Chang, who is Chinese. Occasionally lampshaded, such as when Britta comments that they don't have a Latino member.
  Dean Pelton: Well, look at this group. Having some kind of meeting and being so diverse. There is just... boy, there is just one of every kind of you, isn't there?
• Freudian Trio: Troy, Abed, and Annie form one when they start living together in Season 3.
  • Id: Annie — Passionate and emotional. Gets the guys in more shenanigans than even they can handle.
  Troy: You moving in was supposed to tone us down!
  • Superego: Abed — Logical and analytical.
  • Ego: Troy — Balances the two out. It becomes apparent when Troy leaves in Season 5 and Annie and Abed get into a dispute over who to accept as their new roommate.
    • When Britta moves in, Annie takes over as the Ego while Britta, the newbie, becomes the Id.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: A few within the group. Pierce and Abed only have a few notable moments together throughout the series, while Troy and Shirley don't have a side-plot with just the two of them until Season 4. Somewhat justified in the case of Pierce and Abed, who admits he doesn't find Pierce all that compelling as a character.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The group is reduced to Jeff, Britta, Abed, and Annie by the start of the final season, then with just Jeff and Britta by the Grand Finale.
• The Generation Gap: A fundamental dynamic of the group, as they're all of different ages. It's most obvious between Pierce (Baby Boomer) and the rest of the group (Generation X and younger), but there are generational conflicts between Shirley and Jeff (Generation X) with the occasional addition of Britta (in-between) on one side and Troy, Abed and Annie (Millennial) on the other as well.
• Good Is Not Nice: With the exception of Pierce, the study group almost never intend to hurt anyone. However, they can also be insufferable, self-absorbed jerks who take things too far and are ignorant of other people's feelings.
• The Hecate Sisters: Britta (the crone), Annie (the maiden), and Shirley (the matron/mother).
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Happens in "Course Listing Unavailable" when they unwittingly instigate a riot at Starburns' wake and are expelled from Greendale.
• Iconic Item: The wooden rectangle table they use is one of the first things (if not the first) that comes to the audience's mind if the show is brought up.
• Intergenerational Friendship: The group consists of a Baby Boomer (Pierce), two members of Generation X (Jeff and Shirley), and four millennials (Britta, Abed, Annie, Troy).
• It's All About Me: This is the usual attitude of the study group (e.g. thinking that a professor ignited a protest against them so that they could learn about different perspectives of history). It doesn't earn them any favors with the rest of the student body, who are tired of the group hogging the spotlight all the time. This operates as part of the series' tendency to Lean On The Fourth Wall about such matters; while in the real world they would (and to their fellow students they do) appear to be self-obsessed Attention Whores, ultimately they're the main characters of the series and to varying degrees are Genre Savvy about this — so the world they inhabit really is All About Them.
• Jerkass Ball: The whole group has taken this on from time to time.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jeff is the most obvious example, but all of them could be considered as this, being deeply flawed but ultimately benevolent and well-intentioned people.
• Large Ham: They all have their moments, especially Troy and Annie. Pierce takes a level of hamminess in Season 2 (bordering on Evil Is Hammy) and even the normally cool-headed Abed is not averse to exaggerated freak-outs or over-the-top spiels (usually when impersonating one of his favorite TV characters).
• Limited Social Circle: There is barely any activity of the group outside of their established circle and they can be downright hostile towards outsiders, as shown by their treatment of Todd.
  Annie: [to Jeff] Who the hell are you always texting? Everyone you know is here!
• The Notable Numeral: Known in-universe as "The Greendale Seven". (The name usually comes up in unflattering contexts.) Pierce tried to suggest that they should rebrand it to "Pierce Hawthorne and the Greendale Six".
• Not So Above It All: The entire group seems to look down on Greendale's crazy antics but tends to cause most of them. Specifically, Jeff, Britta, Shirley, Annie, and Pierce often try to seem in control, wise, and above-it-all, but often fall to the level of Abed or Troy, who at least tend not to put on airs about how mature and/or cool they think they are.
• Platonic Life-Partners:
  • Jeff and Shirley, first established in "Social Psychology" and solidified in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" (Shirley has this dynamic with all the guys, but it's most prominent with Jeff). The two trust each other with all of their secrets, and Shirley is the only member of the group Jeff isn't afraid to show the less flattering sides of his personality to.
  • Troy and Annie become this after finally working out their romantic issues in "Romantic Expressionism", particularly after they start living together along with Abed in Season 3.
  • Abed and Britta, particularly in the first season and from "Introduction to Finality" onwards. Despite Abed's initial reluctance, they frequently help each other work through their psychological problems and generally seem close to one another.
  • Abed and Annie flirt with this role throughout the series, but it's not until after Troy leaves for his round-the-world journey that their relationship fully develops into this trope.
• Pottery Barn Poor: A source of contention for fans is the fact that the sources of income for almost all the characters are unclear. This ends in the fifth season, when the group except Pierce are all hired by Greendale.
  • Jeff deals with his lack of income and savings in several early first-season episodes and he's briefly homeless, but this is dropped in later episodes, and he always seems to have funds for whatever he needs. During this time, he's shown to live in a nice apartment by himself. Between Seasons 4 and 5, Jeff opens a private law practice and goes bankrupt.
  • Britta is repeatedly established as being poor. Of the younger characters, she is the only one ever seen with a job—in "Critical Film Studies", she works at a diner but gets fired at the end of the episode. Britta is also known to live in an apartment. Season 6 establishes that Britta mooches off of her friends, and her wealthy family have been secretly financing her without her knowledge.
  • Troy lives with his father in the first season, but gets kicked out and goes to live with Pierce. In the third season, he and Abed live together in an apartment, but their source of income is never revealed.
  • Abed is the only one who lives on-campus in the first two seasons, and then lives together with Troy in an apartment in Season 3. He actually gets into debt with a celebrity impersonator company, revealing he has no source of income. Abed seems to have depended entirely on his parents until arriving at Greendale, and it's possible that his father still pays for his bills.
  • Annie's financial status is actually the focus of an episode, "Celebrity Pharmacology." A recurring claim throughout Season 2 and early Season 3 is that she lives in an apartment in a "bad neighborhood." She tells Pierce that she pays her bills with money she saved from every birthday and special occasion (such as the "period fairy") she's had, which, although unrealistic, is at least more than can be said for the others. However, she runs so low on money that she is forced to take a bribe from Pierce. At the end of the episode, she says she plans to get a job, but this is never elaborated on. In Season 3, she begins living in Troy and Abed's apartment.
  • Shirley, as a single mother, presumably receives child support and alimony from Andre. They later reconnect and get back together. Later, she begins attempting to start her business, and Andre implies that he is the breadwinner of the family.
  • Pierce is rich and the heir to his father's fortune, although he chooses to give it up to his half-brother Gilbert Lawson. He presumably has a large fortune for himself.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Their numbers include: a disbarred lawyer with serious Daddy Issues, a socially-isolated pop-culture geek who may or may not have an unidentified mental disorder, a former anarchist struggling to find a new identity, an old and lonely millionaire, a divorced mother of two with anger problems, an ex-drug addict, and a washed-out high school athlete. Despite their individual foibles and flaws, they can (usually) be counted on to come together as a group and makes things right when it counts.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: From most red to most blue we have Troy, Pierce, Annie, Britta, Shirley, Jeff, and Abed. Specific pairings include:
  • Troy, the highly expressive Lovable Jock; and Abed, the stoic, undiagnosable nerd.
  • Annie, the Go-Getter Girl full of drive and spirit; and Jeff, the cool-headed (or, at least he wants everyone to think he is) Brilliant, but Lazy Deadpan Snarker.
• Sanity Ball: The ball seemed to lie pretty firmly with Britta early on, but in later episodes, it gets passed around mostly between Jeff, Annie, Troy, and Abed. In general, Jeff is the relatively normal one (heavy emphasis on "relatively") who is the most likely to realize that the Serious Business doesn't really matter, but usually gets swept up in the rest of the school's weirdness anyway. Annie is the most intelligent and often acts as the group's conscience but doesn't live up to her own ideals as often as not. Troy is generally the most moral member of the group, but also a complete ditz. Abed is Genre Savvy to the point of being a borderline Fourth-Wall Observer but has unspecified mental issues to the point that even he sometimes wonders if he is actually, literally insane.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: The three most antagonistic members of the group, Jeff, Britta, and Pierce, cover their respective issues and hang-ups with either or both sarcasm and douchebaggery.
• Straight Man: Mainly Britta and Jeff in the first season, though in later seasons, the role alternates between Jeff and Annie.
• Teacher's Pet: They are the Dean's favorite students—roles they emphatically did not seek out.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: At their worst.
• The Three Faces of Adam: Jeff (lord), Troy (hunter), Pierce (prophet).
• The Three Faces of Eve: Shirley (wife), Britta (seductress), Annie (child).
• Town Girls: Cheerful, motherly housewife Shirley is the Femme; outspoken, fiery activist Britta is the Butch; spirited, optimistic go-getter Annie is Neither.
• True Companions: For all their bickering, they're an almost unbreakable family unit.
• Two Girls to a Team: The inversion happens midway through Season 5 following Pierce's death and Troy's departure but played straight after Shirley's departure between Seasons 5 and 6.
• Two Guys and a Girl: Troy, Abed, and Annie, who share an apartment from Season 3 onwards. They're also the three youngest members of the group.
  • Inverted in Season 6, when Britta moves into the apartment with Abed and Annie.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Pierce and Jeff are the most obvious examples, but all the members of the group have come to qualify at some point. The best example is in "Competitive Ecology", where they spend most of the episode insulting Todd to his face because nobody wants to be lab partners with him, not to mention they clearly haven't learned their lesson by the end. Professor Kane even refers to them as the "mean clique."
• Vitriolic Best Buds: All of them (with the exception of Troy and Abed) could be said to be this with each other to some degree, Jeff and Britta especially. Shirley and Annie have also become more competitive with each other by Season 4.

Jeff Winger

Jeffrey Tobias "Jeff" Winger

"Can't you be cool, like me?"

Played By: Joel McHale, Jacob Bertrand (young)

Debut: "Pilot"

"I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I can make anything right or wrong. So either I'm God, or truth is relative, and in either case, booyah!"

A charming but manipulative attorney who was forced to attend Greendale upon the discovery that his college credentials were forged. He is de facto leader of the study group, and often struggles between his desire to remain self-serving and lazy, and his bond with his new friends at Greendale.

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• Abusive Parents: In "Home Economics," Jeff makes a throwaway reference to having a drunken and abusive dad when explaining how TV makes an excellent parent.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • He seems to have to learn and relearn that he either needs to start treating his friends better and/or deal with the fact that he's at Greendale and stop acting so high-and-mighty about everything very frequently. Lampshaded in "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design":
    Jeff: He doesn't like fake courses, well, he's about to get a real lesson on the fact that Jeff Winger never learns.
  • "Biology 101" seems to suggest he has finally learned how much he needs his friends (at least subconsciously) just as they are no longer reliant on him, and "Introduction to Finality" basically confirms that he's abandoned his former self-serving attitude.
• Age-Gap Romance: With Annie, who is sixteen years his junior (although their "romance" never really goes beyond Ship Tease).
• The Alcoholic: It's not significantly focused on, but he appears to become a borderline case in Season 5 and especially Season 6. In the first episode of the latter, he quips that drinking alcohol at Greendale gets him through the day, leading Frankie to believe he's confessing to alcoholism, and when she bans alcohol on campus he goes so far as to get everyone to establish a speakeasy just so that he can continue to drink at school. He also apparently spends entire classes doing nothing but drinking.
• Ambiguously Bi: Not as much as the rest of the cast but he does have his moments. Notably, he claims to have "chemistry with everybody", agrees with the Dean that Donald Sutherland was hotter than Elliott Gould and has a suspicious obsession with Chris Pratt's body.
• Ambitious, but Lazy: He tries to be this, but his efforts either fail epically or ends up putting more work than he would have if he had just made an honest effort.
• Amoral Attorney: His Backstory. The very fact that he lied about having a valid college degree is the reason he's at community college in the first place. A colleague of his said the pair (known as Sundance and Tango) were called 'the litter bugs' by prosecutors because they put so much trash back on the streets. He outgrows it as time goes on, and by the Season 4 finale is eager to open his own firm where he can "help the little guy".
• Anchored Ship: The mutual crush he shares with Annie does not develop much in almost 6 seasons. His off & on again fling with Britta is the type of romance that viewers could expect to be fulfilled for good as the show ends, but that doesn't happen either.
• The Anti-Nihilist: His speech at the end of the Season 3 finale definitely has shades of this.
• Attention Whore: Played for Drama. He faked appendicitis in seventh grade so that people would worry about him (22 years later he keeps the cards he received under the bed to prove that somebody once cared for him.) Also see It's All About Me below.
• Apathetic Teacher: After becoming a Greendale teacher in Season Five's "Introduction to Teaching", though he gets better. In Season 6 he slides back and forth between Apathetic and Cool Teacher. Students thank him for genuinely good lectures, but he also spends a fair amount of classes doing nothing but drinking.
• Author Avatar: Jeff is based on a younger, more self-absorbed version of the show's creator, Dan Harmon.
• Ax-Crazy: In "Biology 101" when he gets kicked out from the group he loses it and uses an actual axe to destroy their table.
• Batman Gambit: Manages to pull them off on a number of occasions (see "Modern Warfare", "Introduction to Finality", "Digital Estate Planning").
• Bavarian Fire Drill: A key part of his MO. See the bit about "board-certified Spanish tutor" above.
• Beauty Is Bad: He's a handsome Amoral Attorney who begins the series as a borderline sociopath, but slowly gets better over time.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He spends the pilot trying to get rid of the Study group so he can be just with Britta. By the Grand Finale everyone but Britta has moved on from Greendale, leaving Jeff heartbroken at all his friends leaving him.
• Being Evil Sucks: In Season 1, he admits that he has been a giant jerk to everyone and wants to turn over a new leaf. It becomes clearer that Jeff wants to be a good person, but is sometimes forced to be the bad guy to protect the group. Abed even tells him You Are Better Than You Think You Are because he's a leader, and sometimes leaders have to hurt people to save the whole.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Britta. It quickly gets on everyone's nerves, to the point that Abed insists it is keeping them all from being friends.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't play mind games with Jeff when it comes to his long-lost father.
    Jeff: If you're lying to me, if my father isn't coming, if a car pulls up and anyone other than my father steps out, say an actor or you in a wig, if you pull any Ferris Bueller, Parent Trap, Three's Company, F/X, F/X2: the Deadly Art of Illusion bull-(bleep) I will beat you. And there will be nothing madcap or wacky about it.
  • He later makes good on his promise, chasing down the car Pierce is in, and dragging him out before proceeding to beat him until the other study group members try and pull him off.
  • Jeff has also been known to fake a Berserk Button, just to get out of a difficult conversation by having an excuse to storm off.
  • Picking on Annie (especially if you're outside the study group) also seems to be a Berserk Button for Jeff (although it's inconsistently played).
  • As mentioned below under Bully Hunter, he tends to confront bullies regardless of who they're picking on (although he usually frames it as confronting them for being obnoxious and irritating).
• Better as Friends: Jeff and Britta's relationship zig-zags between this and Friends with Benefits. Despite some romantic tension in Season 1, they appear to have decided that they are Better as Friends... until it's revealed in "Paradigms of Human Memory" that they'd still been hooking up on occasion. The end of that episode, however, sees them apparently decide to call that quits as well. The thought of them as a romantic couple comes up again in the Season 5 finale when they decide to get engaged; it's ultimately extinguished before it can go too far, with Jeff even realizing that he feels more passionately about Annie than he does about Britta in the episode's climax.
• Betty and Veronica:
  • The Archie for Britta's Betty and Professor Slater's Veronica in the beginning.
  • The Archie for Britta's Veronica and Annie's Betty.
  • The Veronica to Troy's Betty for Britta's Archie.
• Big Brother Instinct: It's muted, but he has this reaction on learning that his father isn't treating his half-brother well. Jeff learns that William Sr. favors his older son over Willy Jr., and thus tries to be civil to the latter over Thanksgiving. He hits his Rage Breaking Point when William Sr. says his leaving Jeff made him a better person, and tells him off for thinking that abusing his children is good.
  • Jeff is also subtly protective/supportive of Abed, Troy, and Annie (the last of which complicates his attraction to her).
• Big Good: Begrudgingly of course, but by Season 6, Frankie describes him as the de facto leader of Greendale.
• Big Man on Campus: At least, the fact that he's popular and handsome leads him to think this about himself. Though it's played with, since it's also made pretty clear that he's neither quite as popular as he likes to think nor does the position of "Big Man on Campus" mean all that much when the campus in question is Greendale.
• Blatant Lies: The other key part of his MO.
• Break the Haughty: Much of Jeff's character arc basically involves getting him down from his high horse by any means necessary, usually through a combination of humiliation. Deconstruction and good old-fashioned Character Development. It is Played for Drama at the end of Season 6, where Jeff is freaking out about how he's the only one of the study group that may never leave Greendale, since he can't rebuild his law career as a good person and doesn't know what else he can do. Annie reassures him that it may change, as he lets her go to pursue a career with the FBI.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Played with for Jeff; he's clearly quite clever, he's very lazy, but whenever he tries to coast on this, things usually go wrong for him.
  Jeff: Well, the funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without ever having to do any work.
• Broken Ace: One of his defining traits is his failed attempts to convey himself as The Ace.
• Bully Hunter: Jeff's a curious example; on the surface, he seems thoroughly reluctant to involve himself in anything outside his own self-involved little bubble, and isn't adverse to letting rip with the odd snide and cutting comment himself, yet he consistently appears unwilling and/or unable to let bullying go unchallenged. Pretty much every time a bully/group of bullies has appeared, even if the victim isn't one of his friends Jeff's more often than not ended up confronting them; he'll usually frame it as confronting them for being a loud, obnoxious and irritating dickhead rather than a bully, but nevertheless. In "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" we learn Jeff himself was a victim of bullying as a child, which might explain this.
• Calling the Old Man Out: To both his own and Pierce's father.
• The Casanova: Especially noticeable in the first half of Season 1, somewhat tuned down afterwards.
• Celebrity Resemblance: Other people note his resemblance to a) Ryan Seacrest and b) Thoraxis, an Inspector Spacetime villain.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "But here's the thing." Usually said when he's endeavoring to be the voice of reason, and appears in nearly every one of his trademark "Winger Speeches".
  • In Season 1, he also has "That's the Winger Guarantee" as a holdover from his days as a lawyer.
• Character Development: Just one example of how far he has come: the first "Winger Speech" he gives in the pilot episode shows that he is a moral relativist, that there is no such thing as truth. By the end of the third season, he has renounced that belief and become a moral absolutist stating that "the truth is helping others is good".
• Characterization Marches On: He's much more of a Jerkass and borderline-sociopathic Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist in the pilot, with little sign of the heart of gold he would have even a few episodes later. He also spends the entire episode wearing sweatpants, in contrast to the fashionista he will later become.
• The Charmer: He's usually good at making a first impression, though exactly how charming he is varies.
• Chewbacca Defense: What his arsenal of lawyer tricks consists of.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: A very, very reluctant (and occasionally quite petty) version of the trope.
• Closet Geek: He's one of the few characters to get every single one of Abed's references and "Home Economics" reveals that he collects (or used to) Spider-Man comics, even arguing with a buyer over the value.
• Commitment Issues: He admits having these in "Interpretive Dance".
• Competition Freak: He just has to be the best at everything he participates in. This nearly drives him crazy when he meets Rich in pottery class.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Amoral Attorney Jeff is usually in a button-down top and pants.
• Control Freak: For all his cool nonchalance and supposed lack of caring about anything, whenever his control and influence over the group starts slipping, he gets very uptight very quickly. He eventually admits to Shirley in "App Development and Condiments" that he loves being in control of everything and everyone around him, and it's only because most of the time he is that he's able to pretend that he doesn't care about anything.
• Cool Big Bro: He steps into the role for the younger members of the study group. An early example would be during The Tag when he walks in on a krumping session between Troy and Abed and soon joins them.
• Cool Shades: Which he will usually combine with a leather jacket and a well-timed Glasses Pull for maximum effect.
• Court-martialed: Done in-dream in the episode "G.I.Jeff", he dreams that he and the study group members are members of G.I. Joe and gets court-martialed for killing Destro which is against the Joe team's rules for some reason.
• The Cynic: Jeff is practically the embodiment of an extremely cynical and jaded person.
• The Dandy: His preoccupation with his clothes and his 'crispy' hair is a Running Gag.
• Deadpan Snarker: Practically his M.O is sarcastic put downs.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Jeff deconstructs the Loony Friends Improve Your Personality trope from the other side. Yes, the Loony Friends gradually help improve his personality... but only because it turns out that for all his pretensions towards normality and his condescending attitude towards them, he's actually just as messed up as they are. He also deconstructs the "wacky lawyer who wins all his cases through courtroom antics" type by showing that a person who can win any argument and acts like the rules don't apply to him would probably be very hard to put up with in everyday life.
• Decoy Protagonist: His role as the lone viewpoint character lasts maybe halfway into the first season and rapidly diminishes from there.
• Defrosting Ice King: He begins the show firmly in Jerkass territory, but later evolves into a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who stands by his friends in their time of need.
• Did Not Get the Girl: He never officially gets together with either Annie or Britta, though the series finale does leave the door open for the possibility of a romance with Annie later on down the line.
• Disappeared Dad: Many of Jeff's issues stem from his father abandoning him as a child.
• Dismotivation: Subverted; Jeff wants to get his degree, get out of Greendale and back into his cushy high-powered lawyer lifestyle, but is incredibly lazy, used to coasting on his wits and charm, and sees doing any more than the bare minimum amount of effort required to get by, be it in getting his degree or doing anything for his friends, as a personal failure. Naturally, he often falls into the trap of doing more to actually avoid doing anything (and consequently bringing on more trouble and strife to himself as a result) than would be necessary if he just sucked it up and put an honest effort in.
• The Ditherer: Inverted; on the surface, Jeff is confident, charismatic and in-control, which is why everyone treats him as The Leader, but when you look closer it's increasingly clear that while he can talk a good game he's never really committed to anything meaningful in his life before the study group and always takes what he thinks/assumes is the easy option out of a situation because it saves him from having to risk anything or actually take a stand about something.
• The Dulcinea Effect: Jeff decides he has a crush on Britta in the very first episode and spends the rest of the season pursuing her until they hook up in "Modern Warfare".
• Embarrassing Nickname: "Tinkle Town", when he was a kid. Some of his nicknames at Greendale (Forehead, Mr. Insecure, Seacrest) aren't particularly flattering either.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Besides the Dean, many men have expressed attraction towards him.
• Everyone Has Standards: For all of his flaws in Season 1, he maintains that Annie is off-limits for flirting from older guys or being mocked for her breakdown in high school. He only backs down from chasing Vaughn off because Annie tells him that she's an adult and doesn't need him to be her dad. Downplayed as it doesn't stop Jeff from later making out with her in the finale.
• Faux Affably Evil: In his Amoral Attorney days. He could act very nice and charming for someone who used to, in Jeff's own words, "actively endorse pain."
• Faux Fluency: Pretending to be a "board-certified Spanish tutor" from the very first episode. This is lampshaded by Annie: "What board certifies a tutor?"
• Fence Painting: Yet another part of his MO, most notable in "Pillows and Blankets".
• First-Name Ultimatum: In his Jerkass moments, Shirley and Dean Pelton both have a habit of calling by his full first name ("Jeffrey"), in an almost parental tone.
• Forehead of Doom: This feature has been brought up several times when insulting him. Jeff is himself very self-conscious about it.
  Jeff: [looking at a doll with his likeness] Oh, come on! My forehead's not this big!
  [the others make non-committal noises and avoid making eye-contact with him]
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Phlegmatic.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In "Accounting for Lawyers", the email Alan sent to the bar association that got Jeff disbarred in the first place reveals his middle name is Tobias.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Jeff drastically changed his image and attitude after a brutal lashing at foosball — a loss so bad that young Jeff actually wet himself — by a bully who turns out to be Shirley when he was 10 years old.
  • His parents' divorce led to him choosing his future line of work because he wanted to be unaffected by emotional vulnerabilities. His problems with commitment most likely stem from the same root.
• "Friends" Rent Control: Averted in Season 1 where he's shown living in his car and at one point has to move into Abed's dorm room. Played straight from Season 2 onward, where he's shown living in a nice apartment despite being single and having no apparent job. Justified in that his old boss likes him and says he can be paid for consulting work in Season 2, compensating him handsomely for his time.
• Functional Addict: In the last season, Jeff has slipped farther into alcoholism and depression, but is still able to do his job without much trouble. He doesn't seem to understand what the word "alcoholic" actually means, as when Frankie calls him a "functional alcoholic" he thinks it's an oxymoron.
• Gentle Giant: When he's not being a Jerkass.
• Guile Hero: Jeff is all too willing to use trickery to get what he wants, and he's very good at it. He once turned a racist accusation by a black guy completely against the same black guy in less than 5 exchanges.
• Handsome Lech: A good-looking guy who isn't always successful hitting on women.
• Hard Work Hardly Works:
  • Averted (despite his best efforts) and Lampshaded.
    Jeff: The funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without having to do any work.
  • Often falls into the trap of Laborious Laziness despite recognizing and lampshading this tendency of his ("I'm always willing to go the extra mile to avoid doing something").
• Has a Type: Jeff is attracted to intelligent and mature women, especially those who can match his banter. He spends most of the first season chasing after Britta but mostly gives up on her after she proves at least as crazy and stupid as he is, dates one of the few sane professors at Greendale, and first realizes he has feelings for Annie when they're studying alone together. He admits in the Season 3 premiere that he treats her like a kid in an effort to deny his real feelings for her, and the only time he is annoyed at her flirting is when she's acting like a kid. In the Season 2 premiere he brushes her off since she's acting like a blushing virgin, and in the musical Christmas episode of Season 3 he completely ignores her attempting to seduce him in a Sexy Santa Dress because she's acting like a babyish Brainless Beauty.
  Jeff: You are an intelligent woman. Also you're Jewish.
• Held Gaze: With Annie, leading to quite a lot of their Shiptease.
• Hidden Depths: It's frequently made clear that beneath the smooth, confidently amoral charmer, there's basically a wounded and lonely ten-year-old trying to build a shell around himself. To a lesser degree, despite his surface disdain for the geek culture exemplified by Troy and Abed he's very good at spotting Abed's pop culture references and, according to "Home Economics", apparently collected Spider-Man comics, and is shown to both own (in "Comparative Religion") and play (in "Intro to Political Science") guitar. A lot of his vanity also stems from deep-seated body image issues, and he once admitted that he was afraid of being fat because he believed that if he was fat no one would like him.
  • The fact that he got mad that he didn't win the "Best Halo Score" award at Howie Schwartz's bar mitzvah, and the fact that there appears to be a Playstation 3 in his apartment hints that he might be a gamer.
• Hipster: Jeff tends to occupy the 'vain, self-centered and obsessed with being the coolest-yet-most-aloof person in the room' part of the stereotype.
  Jeff: Hipster! Come on, would a hipster wear $300 jeans from Italy?
• Homeless Hero: After losing his condo, Jeff spends most of Season 1 living in his car.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Both his love interests, Britta and Annie, are an entire foot shorter than he is.
• Hypocrite:
  • His aloof sense of smug superiority towards Greendale and almost everyone around him can take on this edge when you remember that he's a failed lawyer who's reduced to having to attend a crummy community college in order to qualify for the degrees he falsified; objectively speaking, he's just as much a loser as everyone around him that he looks down on.
  • Despite his insistence that Annie should not be sexualized, he wanted her to dress up as a "ring girl" in "Paranormal Parentage" (although she was a few years older by then).
  • As much as he hated Pierce's assertions that he was gay, Jeff himself repeatedly assumes Frankie's a lesbian in Season 6.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: It's often suggested that underneath his confidence, charm and superior attitudes to his friends and Greendale in general, Jeff has some very deep-seated self-esteem issues due to his warped parental relationships.
• It's All About Me: Jeff clearly wants to think he's the center of the universe and that everything revolves around him, and can get very touchy when someone suggests otherwise.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: At the end of the series, despite being in love with Annie, he gives up on her, so she can pursue her dreams of working as an intern at the FBI.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: His default setting is the "Jerk" part. While the study group enables him to gradually develop and display a heart of gold, he originally wasn't very nice at all, and can occasionally regress. However, once you get past the cynicism and snark, he does have a good heart deep down.
• The Killjoy: In general, his rather snide and cooler-than-thou attitude, his efforts to demonstrate aloof and ironic detachment at all times and his tendency to moderate and police the behavior of his friends to conform with his standards of 'normal' can sometimes mean that he can ruin the fun a bit. Alternatively, his sense of humor is rather cutting and mean, and he can frequently seem to have fun most at the expense of someone else, which can also have the same effect. Seems especially the case in "Remedial Chaos Theory" where the timeline resulting in him going to get the pizza is ultimately the one where everyone ends up having the most fun.
• Laborious Laziness: He works surprisingly hard at being lazy. Lampshaded at one point, where he smugly boasts about how he's "always willing to go the extra mile to avoid doing something", apparently without noticing the contradiction. Deconstructed in "Introduction To Film" when he tries to sign up for Professor Whitman's class on "seizing the day" as an easy A, only to find himself the only one failing it. After unsuccessfully trying to impress Professor Whitman with his various over-the-top attempts, he finally snaps and demands to know why Whitman won't cut him some slack given how hard he's working at it, only to be informed that this is the reason he's failing; if he truly knew how to relax and seize the day, he wouldn't need to work so hard at it.
• The Leader: A mixture of a Type IV and Type II, though the Type II fades in and out at times.
  • Subverted in Seasons 5 and 6. Despite being the nominal leader, Annie tends to act more like a true leader than him.
• Like Father, Like Son: There are quite a few similarities between Jeff and his father (both are emotionally guarded/stunted, narcissistic, charismatic, and both have run their share of cons).
• Lives in a Van: After losing his condo, Jeff lives in his car for a while.
• Lonely Together: Why he and Britta spontaneously decide to get married near the end of Season 5. With Greendale being shut down and them being forced to face the music, they realize that neither are any closer to getting their shit together than when they first met (unlike Annie or Abed, who are younger and still have their whole lives ahead of them) and decide that getting engaged is the only way for them to look back at their time spent at the school and say they've accomplished something since Jeff originally started the study group to hook up with Britta.
• Loony Friends Improve Your Personality: Although it's played with, in that it's gradually revealed that as much as he might try to deny or hide it, he's just as loony as the rest of them in many ways.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: While Jeff seems to be competent at seducing women when he wants to and would, on the surface, seem to be far from being a loser, Britta (the only one of the group who has actually had sex with him) often claims that he's actually incredibly bad in bed. It's implied that it's due to him being self-centered and emotionally closed-off, he only focuses on his own pleasure. Considering that she continued to return to have sex with him many times, though, it could just be something Britta says to tease him — though considering that it's also made clear that Britta has a tendency to trap herself in self-destructive and unfulfilling relationships with damaged losers and weirdos as a way of validating her own lack of self-worth, probably not.
  • In "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", while playing D&D and doing good during an encounter, Jeff strokes his own ego by wondering aloud "What am I not good at?" prompting Britta to snark "Sex", causing him to do a Double Take in disbelief before the scene moves on.
  • In "Contemporary Impressionists", Britta says that Jeff is a poor lover due to being emotionally closed off in bed.
    Britta: You were emotionally closed off in bed to the point where one time, I didn't come up because I couldn't find close enough parking.
  • In "Geothermal Escapism":
    Troy: I'm better at sex than Jeff, right?
    Britta: I've yet to have anyone worse.
• Lust Object: For Dean Pelton, who is never subtle on how he drools over Jeff.
• Master of the Mixed Message: For most of the series, even he himself does not know if deep down he has feelings for Annie or only considers her a very good friend. Finally subverted in "Basic Sandwich", when him thinking about Annie is what causes him to jump-start the computer and free the group from Borchert's lab, though even then he doesn't actually act on these feelings until the final episode of the series.
• Meaningful Name: His last name is Winger, and he's spent his adult life, well, winging it.
• Mellow Fellow: He would like you to believe he's this, but he actually deconstructs it; he goes to great lengths to be seen as laid-back, cool and uncaring about things, all of which really just proves how truly uptight and incapable of relaxing he is.
• Memento MacGuffin: Jeff has kept his father's boxing gloves.
• Mirror Character:
  • It's often made clear that Jeff and Pierce are not quite so different as Jeff would like to believe, and that Pierce is essentially what a future version of Jeff will look like if he doesn't improve his ways and character.
  • The trope is also a bit in play with him and Abed. It is repeatedly made clear that Jeff is really just as well-versed in pop-culture as Abed and understand pretty much all of his movie and series references, but where Abed openly expresses his geekiness, Jeff attempts his darnest to hide it and puts on an aloof Closet Geek act instead. And then there is how he responds to two of his major life-crises. In the first case, Jeff copes with the fear of possibly losing touch with the group after graduation by having an elaborate daydream about an evil version of himself trying to take over his life and hurt his friends, and in the other, he tries to escape from the idea that he is inevitably getting older by retreating into a more pleasant fantasy world which is heavily associated with his childhood memories of a popular animated show, and the resulting episode is even rendered in said show's style, much like both of these happened to Abed.
• Mistaken for Gay: Pierce maintains that Jeff is a closeted homosexual for much of the series, though some episodes suggest it's actually his (ineffectual) way of knocking Jeff down a peg on a regular basis.
• Momma's Boy: Despite his issues with his mother, Jeff thinks better of her than of his absent alcoholic father. He says the difference was that she stayed, and he left.
• Mommy Issues: His mother praised him too much and now he has trouble accepting failure.
• The Movie Buff: Nowhere near Abed, of course, but he does pick up on most of Abed's references and displays a higher than average amount of movie knowledge. Justified in that he was practically raised by TV.
• Mr. Fanservice: He has quite a few Shirtless Scenes. And then there's the pool match...
  Jeff: I discovered a new back muscle to work out. Ladies, you'll thank me come tank top season.
• Narcissist: Often discussed in-universe. Thankfully, his experiences at Greendale improve him somewhat.
  Jeff: I'm Jeff Winger, and, if I had my choice, I would rather look at myself naked than the women I sleep with.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: He runs basically the entire spectrum of amorality tropes. Lampshaded by Jeff in "Digital Estate Planning" when Gilbert cheats.
  Jeff: You're cheating! Which I have no problem with, except you're getting caught, and that's not cool!
• Not So Above It All: He may think of himself as the Only Sane Man, but in reality he's had his share of crazy moments too and will occasionally join in with Troy and Abed's antics.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: There was only one time that Jeff didn't go for a Laborious Laziness route; that was in "History 101" where he participated in grueling games to get seven spots for his friends in a History of Ice-Cream class. His friends don't realize, but Jeff was willing to get maimed to secure the balls that would qualify them. In Abed's Imagine Spot within an Imagine Spot (It Makes Sense in Context), Jeff admits it's because change is scary, so you need to do what you can to face it head-on rather than avoid it.
• Odd Friendship: Develops this kind of relationship with Shirley. Comes to a head in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism", but they become even closer after the events of the episode.
• Older Than They Look: It's revealed in "G.I. Jeff" that he's 40 as of that episode.
• One Head Taller: At 6'4", he towers over 5'3" Annie and 5'4" Britta. And the rest of the study group, save Pierce.
• Only Sane Man: Jeff likes to think and act like he's this, and it's initially played more-or-less straight, but it's gradually subverted and inverted over the course of the series when it becomes apparent that he's in many ways more messed up than any of his wackier friends.
• Papa Wolf: Despite being rude and dismissive towards his friends on a regular basis, he's very protective of them whenever things get ugly or dangerous, especially Annie.
• Perma-Stubble: In Season 2 and onward, although he does spend the occasional episode clean-shaven. Season 6 starts to convert the stubble into a full beard, signalling that he has accepted that he will never leave Greendale.
• Phony Degree: He lost his job as a lawyer because he misrepresented a degree from a university.
• Physical Scars, Psychological Scars: When recounting the ways he was traumatized by his father leaving the family, Jeff recounts an incident when he cut himself with scissors in order to fake appendicitis. (See Attention Whore above.)
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Jeff struggles with this in Season 6, and is the crux of his conflict in "Intro to Recycled Cinema" and the Series Finale, "Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television". With Troy and Shirley leaving and Pierce dying, Jeff fears that he will be left alone at Greendale while all of his friends leave, and nearly breaks down when Abed and Annie follow suit in the finale.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Admits he was raised by TV and consistently performs well in physical competitions like paintball and Hot Lava. Also, in "Epidemiology" (one of the only instances where the group's lives were in actual danger), Jeff handles the situation better than just about anyone else, even managing to take out one of the zombies with a well thrown soccer ball.
• The Precious, Precious Car: His Lexus.^note For those who might be curious, the Lexus he's driving is a second generation IS 350.
• Precision F-Strike: He drops (censored) F-bombs in three of the show's four documentary episodes.
  Jeff: What are you doing?
  Abed: Shooting a documentary on Changnesia.
  Jeff: You gotta be fucking kidding me.
• Punny Name: Winger doesn't prepare, he wings it.
• The Reveal: The person he's constantly texting is nobody.
• Rousing Speech: Frequently making these is one of his iconic character traits, verging on Once an Episode at times. In "Paradigms of Human Memory", the audience gets a whole montage of them spliced together.
• Sanity Slippage: Caused by Rich's perfection, getting kicked out of the study group, and hearing Pierce's news about his father visiting him.
• Secret Relationship: With Professor Slater in Season 1 and with Britta in Season 2.
• Secular Hero: He's agnostic, much to the collective derision of the study group. Everyone else has definitively made up their minds about whatever gods may or may not exist: Annie is Jewish, Abed is Muslim, Shirley is Christian (specifically Baptist), Troy's a Jehovah's Witness, Britta's an atheist, and Pierce belongs to a cult he calls "Reformed Neo-Buddhism". Jeff opts for not talking about religion to keep the peace, and addresses his thoughts on the topic as such:
  Jeff: To me, religion is like Paul Rudd. I see the appeal and I would never take it away from anyone, but I would also never stand in line for it.
• Selective Obliviousness: When it comes to his treatment of Pierce. In his arguments with Annie about him, Jeff frequently takes the position that Pierce is just fundamentally a Jerkass, whereas Annie makes the case that it's only because people are always treating him poorly that he acts out. It is perhaps worth noting that out of the study group, Jeff is the most unrepentantly snide, mean-spirited and dismissive of Pierce and treats him poorly more frequently than the others, thus potentially explaining why he might not want to consider the possibility that it's his own treatment of Pierce that has caused most of the problems.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Despite his best efforts, he never rebuilds his lawyer career. Part of it is wanting to do the right thing in court when before he was an Amoral Attorney and the other is being a few years out of practice. He becomes a Greendale professor to pay the bills and starts Drowning My Sorrows about being a professional failure. Though he does hope Annie is happy when she goes to work for the FBI, and knowing that she is helps.
• Ship Tease: Exaggerated Trope. He has years of heavily teased Unresolved Sexual Tension with Annie. The finale doesn't definitively answer it one way or the other. In it, Jeff acknowledges his feelings for Annie but recognizes that her opportunity to leave Greendale for an internship with the FBI is too good to pass up. At her suggestion, they end up sharing a kiss before she leaves. It's left open as to whether or not she will return sometime in the near future.
  Jeff: ... We were just saying goodbye to the room.
  Annie: For Season 6. Season 7, who knows? It's out of our hands. Too many variables.
• Shout-Out: Dan Harmon has said that Winger is named for (and his personality modeled after) John Winger of Stripes.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Learning this is essentially his character arc; Jeff's cynical and self-serving outlook on life has ultimately left him lonely, miserable, riddled with psychological issues and as big a failure as anyone else at Greendale no matter how much he might try to deny it.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: The Wisecracker. Jeff is a sarcastic cynic with a heart of gold, who constantly makes quips. He starts off as the protagonist/POV character before the series shifts to more of an ensemble focus.
• The Slacker: He has made it his life's goal to get through life while expending as little effort as possible.
• Slut-Shaming: Gets a lot of flak from the rest of the group for his womanizing tendencies. Although it's partly this, and partly because he has a tendency to be a bit of a sleazy jerk about it.
• Small Name, Big Ego: For all his strutting and arrogance, it's often made clear that he's more of a big fish in a small pond than he'd like to admit.
• Smug Smiler: One of his default expressions is an incredibly self-satisfied smirk.
• Smug Snake: Although not strictly a villain (although he's fallen into the role from time to time), Jeff is an incredibly smug and arrogant man who, while certainly intelligent and charming, nevertheless isn't quite the magnificent bastard he believes himself to be. While Jeff is a lot cooler and more competent than the people around him, that's generally more due to the incredibly uncool and incompetent nature of Greendale and those around him than Jeff himself. It's especially telling that even in the Pilot, his manipulation skills aren't nearly as good as he thinks, given that Ian Duncan gives him a bunch of papers saying booyah and not the spanish exam answers in advance.
• Sore Loser: He basically storms off in a huff in "For a Few Paintballs More" when he's the first person to get eliminated in the final battle.
• Stepford Snarker: Feigns cynicism and indifference in order to hide his feelings.
• Still the Leader: In the last two seasons, he continues to believe he is the leader, when Annie seems to fulfill that position better.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: His hair isn't that dark, but he's incredibly tall (at 6'4", he towers over everyone but Pierce) and the snarkiest character in the study group.
• Team Dad: Reluctantly. It also adds a level of Electra complex to his flirtation with Annie, which Jeff finds somewhat disturbing.
• Took a Level in Kindness: As he attends Greendale and hangs around the study group, it becomes increasingly clear that Jeff has come a long way from the almost completely self-absorbed and amoral person he was at the beginning of the series.
• Too Much Alike: Ultimately the reason his relationship with Britta never evolves into a full-fledged romance. Any attempts at getting together are mired in a combination of self-hatred, a refusal to accept/cope with change, as well as an (un)healthy amount of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy, and they usually end up bickering nonstop.
• Toxic Friend Influence: His leadership isn't always for the best, and he can be a rather negative force in the group and toward his friends at times.
• Turn Out Like His Father: He admits in "Intro to Felt Surrogacy" that he once met a woman who was perfect for him but bailed on their relationship when he found out she had a son.
• Unknown Rival: He instantly assumes Rich is just pretending to be nice and drives himself crazy trying to prove it, insisting that he doesn't care the whole time. Then there's the Black Rider, who has no idea why this guy with the big forehead is obsessed with being more handsome than him.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Has a tendency to do a leaping forward roll whenever he has to duck into cover in the more action-oriented episodes. It's practically a signature move of his.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: At the end of the fifth season Annie decides to give up on Jeff and almost immediately after Jeff realizes that he is in love with Annie.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Not a complete jerk, but leans towards the Jerkass side of Deadpan Snarker, and most of his problems are his own fault. Pointed out in "Anthropology 101":
  Abed: I can tell life from TV, Jeff. TV makes sense; it has structure, logic, rules, and likable leading men. In life, we have this. We have you.
• White Guilt: After Jeff and Troy find out their new friend Joshua is a blatant racist, Jeff offers to buy Troy frozen yogurt as his white guilt is driving him nuts.
• White Male Lead: Out of two black people, an Arabic guy, an Asian guy, and three women, the main character ends up being the white guy. Although the series becomes a lot more of an ensemble piece over time.
• Worthless Foreign Degree: The reason Jeff is in community college is that his Bachelor's degree is one of these. Formerly provided the page quote for this trope.
  Duncan: I thought you had a Bachelor's from Columbia.
  Jeff: Well, now I have to get one from America.

Britta Perry

Britta Perry

"If I had no self-awareness, I think I'd know."

Played By: Gillian Jacobs

Debut: "Pilot"

"Who do you think I am? I lived in New York!"

A passionate but inept political activist, feminist, anarchist cat owner and psychology student, who, although generally well meaning, tends to eagerly latch on to particular causes with more enthusiasm (and obnoxious self-righteousness) than actual understanding or dedication.

---

• Acquired Situational Narcissism: One of her defining character flaws is a tendency to take any perceived advantage, no matter how slight, and use it as an excuse to flaunt her ego and hold it over everyone else around her.
• Aesop Amnesia: Britta has to learn at least three different times that her "activism" is almost entirely shallow and self-serving.
• Age-Gap Romance: In Season 4, she dates Troy, who is nine years her junior.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: She seems to have quite the thing for damaged goods, jerks and weirdos; subject to a process of Deconstruction in that it's made clear that this is due to severe self-esteem issues on her part, and she initiates these relationships as a self-destructive way of validating her own lack of self-worth.
  Troy: Britta likes guys who are mean to her. She doesn't like herself.
• Ambiguously Bi: While she admits that she'd never kissed a girl prior to "Early 21st Century Romanticism", she does have a few moments.
  • After spending all of "Comparative Religion" insisting that men fighting is an outlet for them to express their "pent-up gayness", she ends up fighting with the only girl in Mike's gang during the big group brawl at the end.
  • She and Annie both give each other looks when the group glances nervously at each other for signs of attraction in "Romantic Expressionism".
  • When the group is debating what "sexy" TV character Abed should role-play as to get a girl's attention, Britta says he should be "like Jo from Facts of Life!" (cue looks from the rest of the group) "... but, you know, the dude version."
  • When everyone is tripping on strange berries in "Intro To Felt Surrogacy", Britta begins caressing Annie's arm with her face while commenting on how soft her skin is. After Jeff declares, "I love women", Britta is shown still rubbing her face on Annie's arm.
• Anticlimactic Parents: Despite her negative opinions about them, her parents are actually very nice people, who are liked by pretty much everyone other than her. Her reasons for disliking them are still quite justified, though.
• The Bartender: She gets a job working at a bar to make ends meet in the Time Skip between Seasons 4 and 5, though it's not until Season 6 that the audience actually gets to see her at work.
• Battle Cry: "Britta for the win!"
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Jeff. Lampshaded by the rest of the study group in "Modern Warfare". Even after they stop sleeping together, a lot of their interactions have a hint of this.
• Berserk Button:
  • She gets annoyed when she finds out that Annie is pursuing someone she was recently linked to.
  • She completely loses it when she finds out that her parents are secretly helping to support her. She didn't mind when she thought she was just mooching off her friends, but goes ballistic when she finds out they in turn had been going to her parents.
• Better as Friends: With Jeff, and later with Troy.
• Betty and Veronica:
  • The Betty to Professor Slater's Veronica for Jeff's Archie in the beginning.
  • The Veronica to Annie's Betty also for Jeff's Archie.
  • The Archie for Jeff's Veronica and Troy's Betty.
• Break the Haughty: Like Jeff, Britta tends to have a rather high opinion of herself. Again like Jeff, many of the plots involving her tend to involve knocking her off her high horse as humiliatingly as possible.
• Buffy Speak: Moreso in later seasons.
• Butt-Monkey: If it's not Pierce, it's Britta. Per Troy, she's the AT&T of people.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "BRITTA FOR THE WIN!"
  • "Duh doy!"
  • "I lived in New York!"
• Character Development: She learns to relax a lot over the course of the series and starts to put less of a huge emphasis into her own neuroses and pet projects, which helps her get more of a handle on avoiding/averting her own hypocrisy. Additionally, she becomes far more effective and insightful as a psychologist and manages to better help her friends on their own terms by using her own imagination and embracing, at least partially, their ways of looking at the world.
• Characterization Marches On: In early Season 1, Britta has "douche-ray vision", is a worldly, well-traveled (if somewhat insufferable and hypocritical) Soapbox Sadie who the other characters come to for advice, and serves as a competent foil to Jeff's jibber-jabber as well as being his Will They or Won't They? fellow romantic lead. By Season 3, douches are her catnip, she's a ditzy Butt-Monkey with No Social Skills who Brittas everything she does, and people who've barely even met her instantly recognize her as "the worst". Britta's seismic shift in characterization is lampshaded by Jeff on occasion, pointing out that she seemed smarter than him when he first met her in Season 3, and outright calls her the Study Group's airhead in the Season 5 premiere. The standing explanation is that Gillian Jacobs greatly prefers to play oddball wacky characters over morally superior characters, and negotiated to make her character more "fun", at the expense of the character's dignity. Amusingly, her regaining some of her own previous intelligence serves as part of her Character Development in Season 5.
• Color Motif: Her wardrobe almost never excludes black, white or/and blue.
• Commander Contrarian: Her Soapbox Sadie-meets-Pretentious Hipster qualities mean that she frequently seems to object to things purely for the sake of being cool and different rather than out of a sincere contrary belief. As Jeff puts it, she's frequently just "pro-anti" rather than anything else.
• Compressed Vice: In "Regional Holiday Music", Glee Club instructor Mr. Rad insists that Britta play the part of a mute tree in the Christmas pageant, and when we finally hear Britta sing, we understand why - she's terrible. The thing is, Britta sings in other episodes, as well as in the very next scene, and she can carry a note fairly well. She was only bad when the plot required it.
• Conspiracy Theorist: She's quite paranoid about the government and its influence on society. She also believes kids should be required to read George Orwell's 1984.
  Britta: We already live in a totalitarian surveillance state! Do you not read my status updates?!
  Abed: But I'm not the government. I'm your friend.
  Britta: That's what governments say, nimrod!
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Often exaggerated and Played for Laughs. A large motivation for Britta's activism is because she wants people to think she's cool, and how will they unless she makes spectacles out of her protests? Hence civil disobedience, no matter how effective, doesn't cut it for Britta. Her D&D moniker was even "Britta the Needlessly Defiant".
• Cop Hater: Derisively refers to cops as "crossing guards with guns".
• Crazy Cat Lady: According to Jeff. Abed also refers to her as an "anarchist cat owner" in his documentary in "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking: Redux".
• The Cynic: While not quite on Jeff's levels, she has a rather pessimistic view toward many things.
• Dark and Troubled Past: It's hinted, and Dan Harmon has confirmed, that she was molested on her eleventh birthday by a man in a dinosaur costume, and that her father didn't believe it had happened. Season 6 seems to suggest the writers quietly dropped the latter part, however, as it never comes up even when she lists off the reasons why she dislikes her parents.
• Deadpan Snarker: She can be just as snarky as Jeff in the first 2 seasons. Even after her character Took a Level in Dumbass, she still gets a few good zingers in.
• Demoted to Comic Relief: In the first season she is essentially the second lead of the show after Jeff and is involved in a Love Triangle with him and Professor Slater. She's also relatively sane compared to the rest of the cast and is more or less the Straight Man of the ensemble, with very few quirks of her own. As the show goes on, Britta loses her role as Jeff's nominal love interest and primary Foil to Annie, her goofiness and Butt-Monkey status are increasingly mined for comedy, and her flaws and storylines (while not without providing some Character Development) are usually Played for Laughs. By Season 6 she's one of the show's go-to comic relief characters and, in the series finale, she's the only one of the original study group who doesn't get a final speech or dramatic sendoff to her character.
• Determinator: She doesn't give up easily when she wants to prove a point. Just ask Troy.
  Troy: [in tears] I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU, BRITTA!
  • Pierce of all people is shown to admire this about her; i.e. when he arranges for Sophie B. Hawkins to appear at Britta's dance because he respected that she didn't back down even in the face of absolute failure.
• The Ditherer: Played with, but in a more straightforward fashion than Jeff: like him, on the surface she seems committed to her various causes and has a very forceful, loud personality, but it quickly becomes apparent that she's not nearly as dedicated as she wants other people to believe she is, and most of her loudness is bluster designed to conceal the fact that she can't really manage to get things together and take responsibility for her life. In Season 5, her former anarchist friends call her out on this by pointing out that not only are they able to do more tangible good for the causes they believe in after "selling out" than she is, but the only reason she's able to self-righteously lecture them about this is because she hasn't done anything meaningful or useful with her life, and so consequently has less to lose than they do.
• The Dragon: To Hickey's Big Bad in the "Floor is Lava" Game in "Geothermal Escapism". She does a Heel–Face Turn after learning from Troy that Abed is seeing real lava.
• Dumb Blonde: Though she starts off as reasonably intelligent, it fades over time, and she falls significantly into this trope by Season 3, to the point of becoming birds of a feather with Troy.
• Ethical Slut: She is implied to have a very active (and kinky) sex life and is not averse to one night stands, Friends with Benefits arrangements, and so on. She has also gotten with two of the four males in the group: Jeff and Troy.
  [Pierce is locked in his panic room]
  Britta: Don't worry. I've been locked in way worse places than this.
  [Troy looks at her, confused]
  Britta: Not against my will.
  [Shirley looks at her, concerned]
  Britta: (changing the subject) Been in there long?
• Foil: Britta has a genuine desire to help others but her obnoxious posturing and limited, somewhat nonsensical understanding of the world tends to put people off more often than not. Meanwhile, Jeff is usually reluctant to get involved but actually has the charisma and know-how to get things done.
• Former Teen Rebel: Used to be an activist who traveled the world and joined the Peace Corps before deciding to go Back to School, which explains her Soapbox Sadie tendencies.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Melancholic.
• Freudian Excuse: Her constant Soapbox Sadie tendencies and urge to lash out at "the system" are eventually shown to be in part her lashing out against her parents, who were apparently very strict and cloying when she was a child to the point that she felt like she was (ironically) worthless and not even a real person.
• Friendless Background: Tearfully remarks at one point that she's never really had any female friends ("Women have always hated me!") and there are hints that most of the people she hung out with pre-study group couldn't wait to be rid of her.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Increasingly rivals Pierce for this role as everyone in the group gets more and more tired of her loudmouth Know-Nothing Know-It-All antics. They even start using her name as a verb meaning "to ruin something". Ultimately downplayed, since she still tends to be on relatively good terms with everyone else in spite of this and, unlike Pierce, her status as a member of the group is never once called into question.
• Friends with Benefits: With Jeff in Season 2.
• Genius Ditz: While her knowledge of psychological theory is shown to be quite lacking and her over-eagerness to apply this flawed knowledge makes her the subject of derision, she is often shown to actually be quite insightful about pinpointing people's issues and what they should do to address them. Unfortunately, because her flawed theoretical knowledge makes her sound like an idiot, people (particularly Jeff) are often inclined to dismiss her advice out of hand when perhaps they shouldn't.
• Giftedly Bad: As a photographer.
• Goofy Print Underwear: During the first paintball episode, Jeff remarks that he finds it funny that a woman wearing Hello Kitty underpants is calling him immature.
• Granola Girl: She was clearly one before entering the show, but snarkiness has turned her into more of a Straw Feminist.
  Britta: I'm a vegetarian.
  Troy: Wow. Shocker.
• The Grinch: In "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas", her rather smug and snide dismissals of the trappings of the festive season, such as Christmas songs, see her come off as a bit of a killjoy.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Britta is the only blonde in the study group and while she may sometimes be a hypocrite, she genuinely cares about all the friends she's made at Greendale and will stand by them in their time of need.
• Has a Type: Britta is attracted to disturbed and emotionally damaged men; as Abed bluntly puts it, this makes her feel saner by comparison. While this often manifests as All Girls Want Bad Boys, it's slightly more complicated than that. Though she does desperately try to go to an ex-boyfriend who she believes is sending her cruel texts (it's actually her friends trying to keep her away from this guy).
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Was once referred to by Professor Slater as the girl with "the infinite supply of leather jackets". The thread of Britta's hypocrisy is reflected in her attempt to look like a sexy badass in animal skins while professing proudly not to eat them. Eventually she undergoes a wardrobe makeover sans leather jackets symbolic of her being less hypocritical and perhaps less of a sexy badass as well.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Has a hidden talent for planning weddings. It upsets her as if that humiliated her as a feminist.
  • She also knows how to knit.
• Hipster: Like Jeff, much as she might try to deny it Britta is totally a hipster. In particular, she tends to occupy the 'pretentious, smug and poorly informed left-winger' aspect of the stereotype. And she's apparently always been a hipster—for example, she deliberately tracked down VHS bootlegs of Rebop as a child.
• Hollywood Atheist: Like everything else, she flaunts it proudly, and it constantly puts her at odds with Shirley as a result.
• Hollywood Psych: Despite her passion for her major, it's pretty clear that her knowledge of psychology only ranges to this. This is done on purpose, to showcase how ignorant she is. And to remind viewers, yet again, how atrocious Greendale's classes are.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Only during the Christmas pageant in "Regional Holiday Music". Otherwise, like when the group comes caroling at Abed's door at the end of the episode, she's average.
• Hypocrite:
  • Although the Soapbox Sadie, Ditz and Granola Girl aspects of her character would be gradually heightened for comedy over time, hypocrisy has been an aspect of Britta's character since the early days of the show —the second episode reveals that her championing of social justice causes is mainly for appearances and credibility points and she doesn't really do anything towards them, and the fifth episode reveals that her trumpeting of honesty as being her big defining feature is a sham when she admits to having cheated on a Spanish test.
  • In the very first episode, Britta conceals her smoking habit from Jeff until he catches her outside with a cigarette while running out to the football field. It's especially funny because Jeff could easily have been the one to be found out in that scene.
  • This is lampshaded in "The Psychology of Letting Go", when Annie, having had to put up with an episode of snide self-righteousness from Britta about her efforts to appeal to guys, angrily points out that despite her posturing Britta obviously also cares about getting attention from men seeing as she wears stripper boots, eats celery and mustard for lunch and gets up "an hour early to ever so slightly curl [her] hair."
  • She proudly and smugly lauds her vegetarian practices over the other members of the study group while simultaneously owning "an infinite supply of leather jackets"; in other words, she'll loudly trumpet her disdain for eating animals as a mark of virtue, but is otherwise quite happy to wear their skins so that she can look like a cool, sexy badass.
  • In "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality", when she calls out her friends for selling out and abandoning their former principles, they in turn point out that they still manage to do more good for the causes they believe in than she does, and that her supposed activism ultimately benefits no one but herself. They also point out that the only reason she calls for the downfall of the system she supposedly loathes so much is that, unlike them, she hasn't accomplished anything and so has nothing to lose from it.
  • She tirelessly needles Jeff about his father issues while having a strained relationship with her own parents (though admittedly she isn't as estranged from them as Jeff is from his father). She later gets pissed at her friends for hanging out with her parents behind her back, despite previously showing up at Jeff's dad's house on Thanksgiving unannounced in an effort to get them to reconcile.
  • In the same episode, she also harangues her friends for accepting money from her parents on her behalf, viewing this as condescending of them. They, in turn, point out that they only started doing so because Britta keeps sponging money from them without showing any intention of ever paying it back, thus making her indignation ring more than a bit hollow; either way, she's still leeching off someone for a free ride, and if she's not going to repay her debts she's got no right to get outraged if her friends accept money from someone who will.
  • Britta vocally and loudly embraces progressive positions, including being a vegetarian, atheist, and Straw Feminist, but she often tends to fall back on using snide implications of repressed homosexuality to mock Jeff or other men.
• Hypocritical Humor: Seeing as there's a bit of a gulf between Britta's beliefs and her actions, she tends to generate this kind of humor.
• Ignored Expert: She's a pretty good psychologist but due to her tendency to forget things and get terminology wrong, her reputation as The Ditz, and her friends' unwillingness to address their issues, her advice is usually dismissed and her attempts to become a therapist are constantly belittled by them. She also found little use for it after graduating due to having a Greendale education.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Britta's approach to activism betrays how she cares less about doing good than getting credit for it, bordering on a savior complex. She can't stand the idea of someone being more "woke" than she is.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Often when her obnoxious, Soapbox Sadie façade is broken down, she reveals her vulnerable side, admitting she actually hates herself, even going as far as to compare herself unfavourably to cancer at one point. A lot of the things she does are to gain respect from others, especially the study group. In Season 3, she discovers a new method of trying to gain respect: touting the fact that she's a psych major and (unsuccessfully) showing off her psych skills.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Britta tends to be rather obnoxious, self-righteous and inept, but her heart is generally in the right place and it's often made clear that she'd jump through fire for her friends.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: And her cats all seem to have an incredible range of illnesses and disabilities.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: She often presents herself as an experienced and enlightened woman-of-the-world, but isn't nearly as well-informed as she believes herself to be or wants others to believe she is.
• Law of Disproportionate Response: She is driven to binge-drinking, a complete identity crisis and the depths of despair essentially over the fact that she turns out to be good at flower-arranging and wedding planning.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Much to the collective amusement of the rest of the group (sans Troy who's ironically better at sex than Jeff. As Pierce puts it, "she has the King Arthur of bad taste in men."
• Lust Object: For Professor Duncan throughout the fifth season.
• Malaproper: Has a tendency towards this; some examples are "edible complex" (Oedipal Complex), "rowboat cop" (RoboCop), and "Steppenwolf wives" (Stepford wives).
• Meaningful Name: Britta is a rather brittle person, who puts on a tough, confident and self-impressed front but is really a rather unstable stew of neuroses and insecurities when you get past the surface. Pierce accidentally foreshadows this in the pilot by introducing her to Jeff (belatedly) as "Brittles". As Abed notes in "Contemporary American Poultry", she compulsively filters herself. "Britta" is also originally a Swedish name (and Britta mentions at one point that she's got Swedish ancestry), and Sweden is commonly considered the archetypical "progressive" country.
• Mirror Character:
  • With Shirley. Although they often come from different ends of the spectrum when it comes to their religious and political beliefs and often clash because of it, they're more alike than they think. In particular, they both tend to get very self-righteous about their particular standards (often without justification) and will often drive the other members of the group up the wall with their moralizing when they get up on their respective high horses.
  • The first season onwards also makes it pretty clear that as much as she disdains Jeff for his superficial and self-centered nature, she is in many ways just as superficial and self-centered. Both of them are also incredibly smug Hipsters who act with a front of insufferable and often unjustified self-satisfaction in order to mask deeper insecurities, and often try just a little too hard to make sure everyone knows that they're the coolest person in the room at any given moment. In certain episodes (like "Modern Warfare" and "Mixology Certification"), their attempts at verbally one-upping each other just end up annoying the other members of the group immensely and equally.
  • Weirdly enough, to Abed, in that both have strange ways of looking at the world, often suffer from having No Social Skills, and are a lot more insecure about their place in the group than they may first seem.
• Mistaken for Gay: Pierce maintains an ironclad belief throughout the series that she's a closeted lesbian. There was also that one girl in "Early 21st Century Romanticism"... and that girl's best friend... and the entire crowd at the school dance.
• Money Dumb:
  • Britta is in huge debt during the second season, which is lampshaded when she meets Troy's childhood hero. She tries to convince him to stay to spend time with Troy by paying him all she has in her bank account, less than 300 dollars. He refuses, saying that she is a nice girl, but is very stupid with her money, which she happily agrees with.
  • If Annie's words are any indication in Season 6, Britta is apparently even worse at paying rent for their apartment than Troy and Abed.
• Ms. Fanservice: She has her moments, notably spending the Cold Open of "Conventions of Space and Time" in her underwear. Defied on Halloween episodes, as she refuses to wear "sexy" Halloween costumes and ends up going so far in the other direction as to sacrifice practicality (for example, dressing in a dinosaur costume that left her unable to use her hands).
• No Social Skills: Her reactions to certain situations tend to be inappropriate or just nonsensical. According to Dan Harmon, this is why she plays a "malfunctioning robot" in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas".
• Not So Above It All: It's suggested a few times that, despite her Straw Feminist-like disdain for traditional women's roles, gender binaries and their trappings (such as marriage) and her tendency to lord it over Shirley and Annie when they display interests that align to this, she's not quite as detached from them as she likes to believe. This most notably turns up in "Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts", in which she displays a surprising innate and instinctive talent for floral arrangement and wedding preparation. Furthermore, for someone who tends to display a Straw Feminist disdain towards the male gender, she seems to frequently use her relationship status and the guys she dates as a way of defining herself and tends to get very, very annoyed whenever men demonstrate interest in women who aren't her.
• Oblivious to Love: She is unaware of Troy's crush on her for quite some time.
• Offscreen Romance: Her actual coupling with Troy happens offscreen between Seasons 3 and 4.
• Old Maid: The fact that she's not getting any younger, any less single or any closer to the hot young rebel she used to be is often touched upon, and it's very heavily implied that despite her posturing otherwise she is not happy about this.
• Only Sane Woman: In the first half of Season 1, she is easily the most "normal" and level-headed member of the study group. It's pretty much gone without a trace by Season 2.
• Overly Generous Fool: In "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking", Britta offers to give LeVar Burton all of the money in her checking account, leading to him describing her as "a good friend, but really stupid with her money".
• Pair the Dumb Ones: Britta dates fellow Cloudcuckoolander Troy in Season 4.
• Person as Verb:
  • In-Universe: To "Britta" something means to screw it up, usually by making a stupid mistake. Lampshaded in "Horror Fiction In Seven Spooky Steps":
    Jeff: You probably just Britta'd the test results.
    Britta: Are people using my name to mean "make a small mistake"?
    Jeff: ... Yes.
  • Deconstructed in "Herstory of Dance"; during his What the Hell, Hero? speech to Jeff about his Jerkass behavior to Britta, Pierce points out that Jeff persistently using a friend's name as a synonym for screwing up and failure is a good indicator that Jeff's actually a pretty crappy friend. Humbled by this, in his congratulatory text to Britta after the concert she organizes goes well Jeff makes a point of saying that she "Britta'd the hell out of it".
• Phrase Catcher: "You're the worst!"
• Plucky Comic Relief: Eventually evolves into this by the final season. She's one of the main sources of comedic relief.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: When Abed (loosely) quotes a bit of Jack Nicholson's famous "truth" speech from A Few Good Men, Britta incorrectly identifies it as a Pink Floyd lyric.
• Prom Wrecker: She decides to throw a Sophie B. Hawkins dance in protest of the Dean's Sadie Hawkins dance, which she believes encourages outdated gender roles by having the "girls ask the guys."
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: For her carnie ex-boyfriend, Blade. Amusingly, Britta is aware of this, and enlists Annie to hold onto her phone to keep her from texting him. Britta ends up convincing Annie to give her her phone back and spends the rest of the night obsessively texting "Blade" (actually Annie, who wasn't so easily duped and put her own number under Blade's contact info), including telling him she's pregnant with their child and leaving sexually explicit texts to get his attention.
• Punny Name: She's both brittle and bitter: Britta.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: She wears them whenever she's trying to feel or look smart. Evil Abed lampshades it in "Introduction to Finality", much to Britta's shame and his amusement.
• Rape as Backstory: It hasn't been confirmed outside of supplementary material, but it has been implied that she was molested by a man in a dinosaur costume when she was eleven. It's usually been played more as Black Comedy Rape.
• Really Gets Around: At least, it's frequently implied that she does. Over the course of the series she hooks up with Jeff, Troy, Vaughn, and Rick; she also made out with Star-Burns while drunk, has several weird ex-boyfriends and dating horror stories, and Troy and Abed rattle off a list of friends they had who she dated and then "ruined".
• Rebellious Princess: She has supportive, loving, rich parents whom she can't stand because of how they treated her individualist tendencies and idiosyncrasies when she was a child.
• Relationship Upgrade: With Troy between Seasons 3 and 4. They eventually decide that they are Better as Friends, though.
• Romantic False Lead: Jeff initially forms the study group to sleep with her and they spend the majority of Season 1 in a Will They or Won't They? dynamic before finally breaking the tension in "Modern Warfare". Then in late Season 2 it's revealed they've been secretly hooking up all season, only to stop when they realize the rest of the group knowing about it takes away the fun. After that they're strictly friends while Annie becomes Jeff's nominal romantic interest for the rest of the series. They nearly have sex again in Season 5 and even become engaged for a time but it's more out of a desperate effort to cling to the past than out of any legitimate attraction, and they break it off for good in the season finale.
• Satellite Love Interest: She starts out as one, having few outstanding quirks or personality traits beyond being a somewhat hypocritical ex-anarchist who can hold her own in a snarkfest against Jeff. Dan Harmon even admitted that Britta's character in the pilot was mainly a plot device to lead to the formation of the study group by Jeff, who was trying to seduce her. Her status as this trope goes away around the time Jeff begins having Ship Tease with Annie and Britta starts having subplots with the other members of the group, notably Shirley in "Football, Feminism and You".
• Secret Relationship: Has casual sex with Jeff in Season 2 and they keep it a secret from the group. She and Troy try to do this with Abed, but he figures it out from the start.
• Secretly Wealthy: Britta's parents are actually well-off. How is it a secret? It isn't revealed until the second episode of the final season.
• Sexual Karma:
  • Her multiple flings with Jeff are generally portrayed as being unhealthy and toxic for both of them, and she's suggested to not find him very satisfying in bed either (going as far as to say "I've yet to have anyone worse" in "Geothermal Escapism"). By contrast, after Britta undergoes a lot of Character Development and starts dating Troy in Season 4 their relationship, physical and otherwise, is shown to be a lot more healthy.
  • She also has a brief and passionate (maybe too passionate) fling with the Subway rep, who's much nicer than her usual type, in "Digital Exploration of Interior Design".
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man:
  • Implied to be the root of her attraction to Troy in Season 3, especially after Annie helps her realize that it was him who sent her a kind text message in "Origins of Vampire Mythology". It's likely this is the first time Britta has crushed on someone who wasn't a jerk, a "bad boy", or an otherwise toxic relationship.
  • Her relationship with Rick begins like this, as he's a Nice Guy who enjoys reading books and wants to build a nonprofit shelter for handicapped animals. Though it's likely that the romance is forbidden factors heavily into their attraction. The whirlwind relationship turns out to be a toxic one come Season 6, with Rick's refusal to let go of his personality as an influencer leading to Britta deciding to let go of him on her own terms.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: In early Season 1, she's The Square, before evolving into The Bigmouth (with some shades of The Goofball thanks to her Cloudcuckoolander nature). Britta constantly and ineffectually lectures the other members of the study group about whatever cause she's stumbled onto that week. Other characters use her name as a verb meaning "ruined."
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: Britta begins as "World Class" in the first season to the point of being nominated for queen of the Transfer Dance in the season finale, but in the following seasons she is considered more of a "Common Beauty"; that is, she is considered beautiful but nothing special.
• Smug Smiler: She can look very, very smug when she gets self-righteous about something. Which is often.
• Smug Snake: Thinks being a feminist and a vegetarian is the be all and end all of being an enlightened woman. It isn't.
• Soapbox Sadie: Parodied; she will latch on to any excuse to jump onto her high horse about something, especially if the something in question is something that is no longer as radical or controversial as she thinks it is. This tends to lead to her making a fool of herself.
  Annie: You're anti-wedding now?
  Jeff: No, she's just pro-anti.
  Britta: No to everything you both said!
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: The kind of humor Britta usually provides.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Her relationship with "Subway", a.k.a. Rick.
• The Stoner: Britta is a recreational drug user, something Shirley hopes doesn't rub off on Troy. While we only ever see her smoking pot, she also alludes to tripping on ecstasy in "Regional Holiday Music", using peyote in "Curriculum Unavailable" and is eager to get a hold of whatever substance the whacked-out partygoers are on in "Epidemiology" (they've actually been infected by a zombified Pierce). Deconstructed in "Remedial Chaos Theory" when she lights up a joint specifically to get comfortable with the rest of the group in an environment outside of school and only doesn't in the prime timeline where Jeff doesn't stop her from singing "Roxanne", thus allowing her to actually cut it loose and have a fun time.
  Britta: How long does peyote last? Just asking for a friend.
• Straw Feminist: It's frequently made clear that her understanding of feminism is flawed and that she mainly tends to use her feminist causes as a way of feeling superior over others.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Towards Jeff. Their relationship tends to fall somewhere between Vitriolic Best Buds and Belligerent Sexual Tension, with a healthy dose of Snark-to-Snark Combat.
• Team Mom: Juggles this with Shirley. Britta tends to be the group's "buzz-kill" and has become more concerned with their mental well-beings since becoming a Psych Major. She's generally at her most motherly when interacting with Abed.
• Tomboy: Has very few stereotypically feminine traits, especially compared to the much more girly Shirley and Annie. She's definitely not One of the Boys, though, largely on account of her Straw Feminist tendencies.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The confrontational and rebellious tomboy to Annie's well-behaved and studious girly girl.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Begins the show as the relatively serious Only Sane Woman before becoming a lot more goofy and incompetent by Season 3. It does start to fade somewhat in Season 5 when she starts to get more Character Development, though.
  • Lampshaded by Jeff in "Course Listing Unavailable":
    Jeff: You seemed smarter than me when I met you.
    Britta: Thank you.
  • Lampshaded again in "Repilot":
    Jeff: Britta, when we met, you were an eclectic anarchist. How did you become the group's airhead?
    Britta: [confused] Thank you?
• Took a Level in Jerkass: She's noticeably a bit harsher in Season 2, particularly to Annie and when she dismisses Abed and Troy's blanket fort as not grown up. The former might be related to her and Annie's competitiveness over Jeff after the events of "Anthropology 101". She proper grabs the Jerkass Ball during "Mixology Certification", when she and Jeff mock Shirley over her drunken past.
• Took a Level in Kindness: While still a Soapbox Sadie and Know-Nothing Know-It-All, she mellows out somewhat in Season 3. In addition to being more vulnerable and sensitive, in Season 4, she is inhumanly patient with Troy keeping their relationship a secret and the somewhat cowardly way he breaks up with her in the switch-er-oo episode.
• Totally Radical: More so after she Took a Level in Dumbass.
• Tsundere: Her actions seems to imply she's a Type B tsundere, especially towards Jeff.
• Unfortunate Names: "What is she, a water filter?" "Can you imagine living with that?" And she doesn't even realize it.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: With Jeff. He finally gets over her, Britta claims she's in love with him... but only as a means of besting Slater and Jeff, and she later recants it in the Season 2 premiere.
• Walking the Earth: She's been to fourteen countries as a member of the Peace Corps prior to the events of the series.
• Weakness Turns Her On: A self-admitted example. She even falls for Troy when he makes up a story about being molested as a child. It's usually played to reflect her own weaknesses, however, since it's suggested she only initiates relationships with deadbeats and losers in order to validate her own lack of self-worth.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: As Annie puts it:
  Annie: It's obvious from your name that your parents smoked pot.
  • Hilariously, she's right.
• Women Are Wiser: None of the characters is a flawless human being, but she tries to act, invoke and otherwise claim this trope (particularly for herself) more than the others, which tends to lead to Hypocritical Humor when reality or her own character flaws trip her up and prove her wrong—usually in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. She does admit at one point that she doesn't really consider herself to be so deep down, however, and her heart is generally in the right place even if there's a gulf between her opinion of herself and the reality.
• Yaoi Fangirl: She is downright giddy at the idea of Jeff's feud with Mike the bully translating into Belligerent Sexual Tension.

Abed Nadir

Abed Nadir

"I have a profile pic now. Cool. Coolcoolcool."

Played By: Danny Pudi

Debut: "Pilot"

"I'm more of a fast-blinking, stoic, removed, uncomfortably self-aware type. Like Data. Or Johnny 5. Or Mork. Or HAL, or KITT, or K9, or Woodstock and/or Snoopy. Of course, Spock probably goes without saying..."

A media-aware and pop-culture-obsessed film student who is either suffering from an unspecific psychological disorder or is just very eccentric. He tends to view the world around him as if he and his friends were the main characters in a weekly television sitcom about a group of oddball students. As such, he tends to make frequent references, comparisons and 'homages' to various TV shows and movies.

---

• Ambiguously Bi: He has a very close relationship with Troy, has been hit on by both women and men, and shows only mild interest in pursuing relationships with girls outside of a fictional context. Jeff and Britta also refer to him as Troy's boyfriend several times (the latter when she is dating Troy, no less). That being said he does eventually get a girlfriend in Rachel and is quite capable of seducing women when he wants to (specifically, Annie). When the Group looks nervously at each other for signs of attraction, Abed makes wiggly eyebrows at Jeff and Britta.
• Author Avatar: Dan Harmon has stated that he believes Abed is the character that best represents him. Make what you will of The Reveal of Abed as the Only Sane Man in "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", which came after Harmon had first publicly said that he felt this way.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: He's so Genre Savvy that he can predict, word for word, how anyone in the group will respond to a given situation. In "Cooperative Calligraphy", it was revealed that in this fashion he figured out the menstrual cycles of the women in the group.
• Badass Bookworm: His interests are centered mostly on pop-culture and literature, but he surprisingly has an athleticism that could compete with resident jock Troy.
• Batman Gambit: A prime example would be him manipulating Jeff and Britta in order to finish a student film, which would then help him patch things up with his father.
• Birds of a Feather: To both Annie and Britta, in that all three are Control Freaks that have countless neuroses and are secretly terrified about their greater inadequacy within the study group.
• Bollywood Nerd: Spoofed (he isn't South Asian, but his actor is). Abed is a total pop culture geek and one of his nicknames is "Slumdog".
• Brutal Honesty: Abed tends to deliver cutting analyses of people without any sort of sugary coat. It becomes a plot point in "Aerodynamics of Gender".
• Cannot Convey Sarcasm: He has to announce whenever he's being sarcastic as well as announce when he's finished.
• Character Catchphrase: (points) "Cool. (beat) Coolcoolcool."
• Character Development: His No Social Skills were emphasized along with his mental issues being played up in the early episodes, and he still seemed to not yet entirely grasp the concept of friendship. After several years of being in a tight-knit clique of friends, however, Abed's become slightly more sociable and is now merely the oddball of the group. He also starts to slowly gain more of an understanding of his own neuroses and gains significantly more empathy for his fellow man as the series goes on.
• Characterization Marches On: Abed is much more of a Motor Mouth in the pilot, and his mannerisms are more nervous and less robotic — smiling, laughing, and gesturing fairly naturally, such as when he's gratified after Jeff gets his references to The Breakfast Club and Dirty Dancing. While Jeff (obviously not a doctor) says he has Asperger's, the ambiguity of Abed's mental issues is amped up to Running Gag levels in later episodes. His pop culture gimmick is also less explicit, though it does still seem to be his go-to resource for communicating with others. Meanwhile, Abed's trouble with recognizing and reading faces is only established in Season 2 — he compares Britta to Elisabeth Shue in the pilot, it doesn't seem to interfere with his impersonating Don Draper in "Physical Education", and he almost falls for Annie's Disney face in "English as a Second Language".
• Character Tics: In season 3, he wails whenever particularly distressed (such as when learning his new favorite show has an "Everybody Dies" Ending, when Annie reconfigures the Dreamatorium to make him more empathetic, and when the clocks are adjusted for Daylight Savings Time).
• Chick Magnet: Despite the study group's misguided assertion that Abed can't pull because of his condition in "Physical Education", it turns out Abed has no problem attracting girls because he's Endearingly Dorky and his aloofness reminds them of their Daddy Issues. Naturally, he's well aware of this. His vast range of TV helps, meaning he can act like Don Draper to attract Annie, for example.
• Chuunibyou: Abed watches too many movies and often emulates the characters and actors to accommodate himself in his social circles. While Troy has fun with Abed and indulges in his fantasies, everyone else isn't as patient with him and reacts with varying degrees of hostility. While his chuunibyou status has made him wiser, improve his conversation skills, and can even make him attract women, Abed comes to realize that he needs help and that this isn't healthy.
• The Comically Serious: His underreactions to the drama around him make for many funny moments.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Nerdy Abed favors graphic shirts under a shirt or jacket.
• Control Freak: Abed is a self-admitted control freak who will go out of his way to exert power over others, usually in order to try to connect with them or ensure they don't abandon him. Despite not having malicious intentions, his actions can make him appear to be a bit of a Manipulative Bastard.
  Annie: You don't have a patent on being a Control Freak, Abed.
  Abed: Actually, I kind of do.
• Cuckoosnarker: He has the most in depth understanding of his friends out of anyone and while seen as innocent and oblivious by everyone around him can be very dry and cutting.
• Deadpan Snarker: Not as much as Jeff or Britta, but he can occasionally do this when he goes into Sarcasm Mode, especially when he sarcastically thanks whoever stole Annie's pen for ruining his day in "Cooperative Calligraphy".
• Declarative Finger: A frequent Character Tic. Especially pronounced when Troy pretends to have switched bodies with him.
• Deconstruction: His problems and issues were a central focus in Season 3, along with the difficulties that his condition produced in enabling him to form connections with and empathize with others. By the end of the season, he mentally snaps and admits that he does have problems and needs help.
  • Taken further in Season 5 after Troy's departure. Without his best friend around to indulge his childish behaviors, Abed's forced to interact more with other members of the group who are far less tolerant of his antics, and his reactions to their disapproval go beyond the usual deconstruction of his control freak tendencies into Jerkass territory.
• Ditzy Genius: For all his social misunderstandings, there is no one who knows more about pop culture than Abed.
• Endearingly Dorky: Eccentric, Sarcasm-Blind, pop-culture-obsessed Abed, with little to no social skills, has no problem attracting girls because he's weird in a cute way and his aloofness reminds them of their daddy issues.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Abed is not only popular with the ladies but apparently with the men as well.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Melancholic.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: At one point he looks directly at the camera and says "This is the movie!" while someone sings "Abed!" in the background.
• Genre Savvy: His defining characteristic. As he says, talking about people like they're in a TV show is his gimmick and they "leaned pretty hard on that last week." He then says that he "can lay low for an episode." As mentioned above, this becomes savvy at times (oddly enough it is relatively rare that he is a victim of Wrong Genre Savvy). He's even Genre Savvy about having mental issues —he got out of a conversation with Chang where he was caught in a lie by pretending to glitch in "Asian Population Studies", making Chang go away in frustration.
  Abed: Works every time.
• Geek Physiques: Tall and lanky.
• Giver of Lame Names: Self-confessed. In "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", the character names Abed comes up with for the D&D game include Bing-Bong the Archer, Lavernica, Marrrrrrr (as Jeff observes, "Boy, you weren't kidding"), and...
  Annie: I'm... [looks at her character sheet] Eww! "Hector the Well-Endowed"?! Abed...
  Abed: I didn't know you'd grab one at random. I made that one with Troy in mind.
  [Troy and Abed do their Secret Handshake]
  Shirley: [visibly alarmed] Yeah, I bet you did...
• Heroic Blue Screen of Death: Ranging from seeing everything in Claymation, mentally shoving himself in a locker, viewing the floor as actual lava, to just freaking out over Daylight Savings Time.
• Hero of Another Story: Brought up in "Intro to Political Science", where Troy asks whether Abed just has his own separate adventures outside the group which he admits. "The Psychology of Letting Go" even has him in the background of the entire episode, seemingly having a highly emotional story where he befriends a couple and delivers their baby.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: His friendship with Troy is a big staple of the show.
• Hidden Depths: "Virtual Systems Analysis" reveals that he is more insecure about his place in the group than he appears. To elaborate, Annie tells him that his "simulations" in the Dreamitorium need to take other people's feelings into account (and she messes around with his mock-up "Dreamitorium engine" to reflect this change). This causes him to go into a Heroic BSoD and drag Annie into a "simulation" where other people's feelings are taken into account, from which he is noticeably absent. Annie later finds him jammed into a simulated locker, where he reveals his fear that if he considers how the rest of the group feels, then he'll have to face the possibility that they don't actually want him around.
• Hyper-Awareness: He predicts the way other characters will act with eerie accuracy, to the point of being able to visualize alternate realities depending on others' choices and sequences of events.
• Informed Judaism: Abed is Muslim, but his religion doesn't really come up, except at Christmas or when Pierce wants to be Pierce. Like the other younger members of the study group, he appears to be Culturally Religious — raised in his religion but is non-practicing as an adult.
• Innocently Insensitive: Has this as a major character flaw. His plan to keep track of Britta, Annie, and Shirley's period cycles so as to avoid saying the wrong thing could also be seen as No Good Deed Goes Unpunished if Annie's Idiot Ball reaction is anything to go by.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite his occasional Jerkassery and oftentimes semi-willful ignorance of other people's feelings, Abed truly does care about his friends and learns to be more sociable and show more empathy for others as the series progresses. When it comes to actual intentions, he borders on being an outright Nice Guy.
• Lack of Empathy: Abed views reality through a lens of fiction, which distances him from other people and often clashes with real people's emotions. He isn't above manipulating others to get his way and will sometimes prioritize tropes over others' feelings (such as trying to set up a Wedding Episode when Jeff and Britta are on the outs). This is explored in "Virtual Systems Analysis", wherein Annie forces him to include empathy in his simulations. It is revealed that he deliberately doesn't consider other people's feelings because he secretly fears they don't actually want him around.
• The Lancer: During the paintball episodes, particularly in Season 2. In "For a Few Paintballs More", he deliberately calls dibs on the "Han Solo role".
• Loners Are Freaks: More of a straight example in the earlier episodes likely due to pre-Character Development.
• Lost in Character: For his walk-on role in Cougartown. Very, very lost.
• Loves My Alter Ego: Annie has a tendency to swoon and show increased interest in Abed whenever he cosplays as Don Draper, Han Solo or Batman.
• Manic Pixie Dream Guy: Discussed in-universe; Troy describes him as "a magical, elf-like man who makes us all more magical by being near us". Also a Deconstruction: his antics can be exhausting and irresponsible, and his odd outlook on life may stem from his mental issues.
• Meaningful Name: The name "Abed" means "worshiper", "adorer", or "devout" in Arabic; The Movie Buff and token Geek of the group, his fandom often borders on reverence. Meanwhile, "Nadir" is an Arabic loanword that's frequently used in English to mean "lowest point"; like many people stuck at Greendale, Abed is at a low point in his life when we first meet him, being a friendless and socially awkward geek being pushed into a career that he has no passion for.
• Meta Guy:
  • Abed's Medium Awareness and Genre Savvy Leaning on the Fourth Wall (if not outright breaking it) is justified as him being a Cloudcuckoolander (or at least a Genius Ditz) with some degree of Obfuscating Stupidity or Insanity—Britta worries in an early episode that he doesn't know the difference between real life and television. In fact, he has transcended normal Genre Savvy into the realms of prophecy now that he is taking film classes. Wild Mass Guessing has postulated that he is either a patron of this site or knows that he's fictional. Examples can be found on the Quotes page.
  • Lampshaded in "Anthropology 101": Abed asks Shirley if she would "spin-off with him" and she responds, "I don't understand, is this you being meta?"
  • There are a few times when it's arguable he's done so already. He sang a variation of the theme song in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas." It's almost like Abed can see the fourth wall out of the corner of his eye, and the only thing he can't do is look into the camera and address the audience. In the same episode, as they walk through the valley where the plants sing Christmas carols, Pierce asks if it will be "expensive to walk through here," to which Abed answers "No, these songs are all public domain." That joke doesn't even make sense out of the context of them knowing they're in a TV show. Suffice it to say, Community plays pretty fast and loose with the fourth wall.
  • In the "Twittersode" before the Season 2 finale, Abed is the only one able to see that every character ends their tweets with a hashtag referencing the show itself.
    AbedsTweets: Why do we keep typing "// #NBCCommunity?"
    JeffWingerAtLaw: @AbedsTweets Nobody knows what you're talking about. AGAIN.=]
  • In "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples" he looks at the camera saying "This is the movie."
  • In "Basic Sandwich," he tells Annie that the only way they won't be back next year is if an asteroid wipes out all life on Earth. He then gives an Aside Glance and says, "And that's canon." Annie stares confusedly at the camera in a futile attempt to figure out who exactly Abed was talking to.
• Missing Mom: Sadly has one. Her absence at an annual Christmas event ends up being the catalyst for "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" wherein Abed has a mental breakdown that causes him to see everything as Claymation.
• Money Dumb: Invoked in Season 1 and 3 he has a serious problem spending money on unnecessary things.
• Motor Mouth: He can slip into this when he's talking about something pop-culture related. A truly epic example occurs when he becomes obsessed with figuring out if Nicolas Cage is a good actor. He spends so much time analyzing the man's filmography that he ends up going on a series of rants which quickly devolve into him actually talking like Cage.
• The Movie Buff: And how! It's his character's bread and butter, to the point of Jeff asking, "Will your reality ever come on Blu-Ray so that we can enjoy it?"
• Nerds Are Sexy: Despite a clear lack of social skills, he seems to have little difficulty attracting women (he's Endearingly Dorky and his aloofness subconsciously reminds them of their fathers). He has also made out with the hottest girl in school.
• Nerdy Nasalness: Abed's nasal voice only adds to his nerdy nature.
• No Social Skills: Until he's forced to branch out after Troy leaves in Season 5.
• Odd Friendship: Develops one with Buzz Hickey in Season 5.
• One of the Girls: A few episodes (most notably "Aerodynamics of Gender") demonstrate that he's surprisingly comfortable bonding with Annie, Britta, and Shirley when the other guys aren't around. One of the flashbacks in "Paradigms of Human Memory" also features him selling "Lady Miss Lady" makeup kits with the girls in his spare time.
• Only Sane Man: He definitely has some issues, but despite his eccentric way of looking at the world, Abed can sometimes come across as being more sensible, calm, and down-to-earth than his supposedly more 'normal' friends. Seemingly confirmed in a literal way at the end of "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps," where it's revealed that Britta's only psych test that didn't come up with something absolutely dreadful was his.
  • Season 3 reveals that Abed is quite fragile without the stabilizing presence of Troy, and is aware of the risk of being institutionalized if he loses his grip. In fact, he starts becoming a lot more selfish and out of touch with reality as Season 3 goes on (to the point of trying to cut off Jeff's arm when his dark side takes over). As much as he managed to solve people's problems in the first and second seasons, he starts causing a lot more in the third and onwards.
• Pass the Popcorn: Part of his Meta Guy shtick. He goes as far as giving cues to the characters so they know how to proceed cinematically.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: A film/TV encyclopedia who can more than hold his own in the school's physical challenges, such as the paintball games.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: Any prophecy he makes in this fashion will be accurate. Later episodes seem to be suggesting that Abed is not as accurate as he thinks, however; "Virtual Systems Analysis" suggests that his analysis is ultimately affected by his insecurities and his personal relationships with the group. In that episode, his predictions lead him to conclude that Britta and Troy's lunch date will go poorly; this is a reflection of his underlying concern that he will be gradually excluded, however, and the date in fact goes very well.
• Proud to Be a Geek: Very much so. When he finds out Troy broke up with a girl because she said Abed was weird, Abed nonchalantly replies, "I am weird."
• Punny Name: Nadir is a last name, but it also means "the lowest point". The opposite of zenith.
• Quizzical Tilt: His signature Character Tic: tilting the head when puzzled.
• Reference Overdosed: References are basically how he communicates with the world. In "Communication Studies," he gets drunk and is horrified to discover he can't recall any shows or movies to reference. At one point, to keep up appearances, he just says "movie reference".
• Sarcasm-Blind: Early Season 1. He gets better. He does tend to need to announce to everyone when he's planning to or using sarcasm, however. Lampshaded in "Advanced Criminal Law":
  Abed: Troy invented rap music, and he's related to Danny Glover, and President Obama.
  Troy: Hey man, that stuff I said this morning wasn't true, I was just messing with you.
  Abed: You were lying?
  Troy: Yeah, as a joke. You've never had somebody mess with you before?
  Abed: Yes, just kidding, no. Like that? ... This isn't a table. [laughs] ... That's funny.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: The Dork (with some shades of The Goofball). He's an exceptionally, almost robotically awkward guy who only understands anything through the lens of television.
• Speaks In Shoutouts: Much of his dialogue is peppered with references to his favorite TV shows and movies.
• The Stoic: Easily the most patient of the group and least likely to get upset. He's even unfazed by sitting through more than twenty-six hours of Duncan's psychology experiment. However, Abed quickly loses his cool when something interferes with the order of his universe (changing his apartment, setting the clocks back, etc.). A danger sign is a continuous, high-pitched wail.
• Stronger Than They Look: Despite the Geek Physiques, he could give resident jock Troy a run for his money in many athletic activities except American Football.
• Tagalong Kid: Although Annie and Troy are technically younger than he is. Doubles as the group's Smart Guy.
• Token Minority: The only person of color left in the study group in the final season.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Season 3 saw him become a bit more ill-tempered and insulting to his friends than the first two seasons. And again in Season 5 after Troy leaves.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Buttered noodles is Abed's meal of choice. He particularly likes the microwaveable kind made by "Papa Penne's."
• Two Decades Behind: His 1980s references. Abed is aged somewhere between 21 and 27, which makes his constant '80s references 10 to 20 years behind where they should be. Most of his references should be from The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium. Obviously the reason is because Dan Harmon (born January 3, 1973) and his references are taken from the '80s and early '90s when he grew up and are transferred into his writing. The show has lampshaded this oddity; it's often made clear that Abed is a fanatical consumer of pop culture in a way most people aren't and that he goes to way greater lengths than most would in pursuit of it. The weirdest example is his encyclopedic knowledge of Who's the Boss? which (depending on his exact age) began when Abed wouldn't have been born yet and ended before he had started preschool.
• Twofer Token Minority: Of Arabic descent and is autistic.
• Unreliable Narrator: Although Abed does appear on Cougar Town and ends the experience with him apparently pooping himself, most of the details he gave to Jeff in “Critical Film Studies” don’t line up with what we see actually happen on Cougar Town.
• Vague Age:
  • He's somewhere in his twenties, but where?
    Jeff: Abed is an adult and a U.S. citizen ... right?
    Abed: Yeah.
  • He is at least as old as Troy as of Season 2, given that he is able to legally drink when the group goes to a bar to celebrate Troy’s 21st birthday, but that is pretty much the only solid piece of information given about his age.
  • There's a possibility that he's closer to Jeff and Shirely's ages than he looks; in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" there's a kid who looks like Abed during the flashbacks (though "Heroic Origins" reveals that the kid in the flashback wasn't him since he had no idea about Jeff and Shirley's interaction as kids), and in "GI Jeff," he claims to be thirty-five (within a year of Danny Pudi's real age), before saying he's joking.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: At first his traditionalist father is disappointed that he wants to study film instead of taking over the family falafel restaurant. He later changes his mind after seeing one of his son's films.
• When He Smiles: His most common expression is a dead pokerface, but on the couple of occasions when he does smile ... it's pretty adorable. Played enormously straight in "Remedial Chaos Theory", though he's obviously forcing it.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Occasionally. It's the closest he ever gets to being Genre Blind.

Shirley Bennett

Shirley Bennett

"Oh, that's nice!"

Played By: Yvette Nicole Brown

Debut: "Pilot"

"I haven't felt any of that chemistry coming my way! I don't know if it's because you're racist, or because I intimidate you sexually, but I know it's one of those two."

A divorced housewife and mother who started attending business classes at the school following her divorce. A devout Christian with a sugary-sweet demeanor, she tends to see herself as the group's moral and spiritual compass and conscience—whether the group wants her to play that role or not.

---

• Action Mom: A mother of two (later three) boys and a force to be reckoned with when provoked. She even takes part in the Season 2 paintball tournament while still nursing her newborn son Ben.
• Aesop Amnesia: There are at least three episodes where Shirley finds out her Holier Than Thou attitude, combined with her competitive spirit, cause her to alienate her friends. It's happened with Jeff twice — the first time when he was a kid to boot— Troy once, and even Britta once.
• The Alcoholic: Started drinking a lot after her divorce. By the present day she's a Recovered Addict, but there are a few times when she almost backslides, and her Alternate Self in the darkest timeline is fully off the wagon once more.
• All Love Is Unrequited: All of her attempts toward romance after her divorce fail, including her memorable fling with the sexy dreadlocks guy in "Contemporary American Poultry".Abed proves to her that the only reason he hung around Shirley was because she fed him chicken fingers.
• The Atoner: It's implied on a few occasions that the strength of her religious faith has something to do with her guilt about her former alcoholism, and it's outright stated that it has a lot to do with her being a bully as a twelve-year-old. Gets deconstructed when her friends call her out for her Holier Than Thou attitude, with Jeff, in particular, saying she likes to appear good rather than actually be a good person.
• Bad Liar: See Verbal Tic, below.
• Badass Preacher: Shirley is both the most religious member of the study group and the most prone to violence. She's absolutely terrifying in "Pillows and Blankets". She cosplayed as one of these during the second paintball game.
• Berserk Button: She is touchy about her age, her weight, and doesn't particularly appreciate jibes about her religious beliefs either.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Shirley appears to have deep-seated rage issues underneath her saccharine-sweet exterior, as noted by Jeff in the pilot:
    Jeff: Shirley has earned our respect. Not as a wife, not as a mother, but as a woman. And don't test her on that, because that thing about the jukebox was way too specific to be improvised.
  • Shirley also threatens Jeff with a pizza slicer at one point.
  • She humiliated foosball competitors as a child.
  • She takes to Video Game Cruelty Potential disconcertingly quickly.
  • She's extremely vicious during the campus-wide pillow fight in "Pillows and Blankets".
• Big Beautiful Woman: She's somewhat more heavyset than the other girls in the study group (and very insecure about it), but her attractiveness towards men never seems to suffer much for it — Chang and Pierce both lust after her at different points, and the Held Gaze sequence in "Romantic Expressionism" implies that Troy and Jeff both find her attractive as well.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She can come off like this — her sugary-sweet exterior conceals an extremely short and sometimes vicious temper, a self-righteous and judgmental nature and what can be quite a bitchy personality at times. That being said, her true character is someone who is genuinely trying to be nice and good to the people around her, and she is painfully aware of and constantly keeping a handle on her deep-seated issues.
• Character Catchphrase: "Oh, that's nice!"
• Character Development: In the second half of Season 3, her bigotry and self-righteousness is significantly toned down. Possibly because of her remarriage with Andre. In her first break with Andre she placed the blame entirely on him, despite details slipping that she was at fault too, later the second time it happens, She admits that it was her fault and Andre may have been right.
• The Conscience: Shirley sees herself as playing this role within the group; it's subverted more often than not.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Shirley, who is a wife and mother, dresses sensibly in a conservative top and trousers.
• The Cutie: With her sweet motherly tone, especially during her catchphrases.
• Deadpan Snarker: In a less subtle way than Jeff, but still present from time to time.
  Shirley: Oh look, Britta brought what she believes in: nothing.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Shirley is essentially the sensible wife out of a wholesome family sitcom who's forced to interact with people who are neither her children nor her Manchild husband and who thus don't regard her as inherently more moral than them.
• Drink-Based Characterization: As a recovered alcoholic, she's always seen with a glass of water when the group goes out drinking together. She comes very close to accepting a shot of whiskey during a moment of weakness in "Course Listing Unavailable", but ends up passing it off to Jeff instead.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: One of her talents is baking, and she hopes to use her business degree to sell her brownies online.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Sanguine.
• The Fundamentalist: Shirley is a Christian fundamentalist who is shown early in the series forcing her beliefs on other members of the group. Most attempts are rather mild, like mandating wearing "What Would Baby Jesus Do?" bracelets. There are other instances hinted at that aren't so benign, like inviting Annie to a pool party which turned out to be an involuntary baptism. Downplayed as later episodes tone this down considerably, and ultimately Shirley is shown to have many good qualities that outweigh the bad.
• Glurge Addict: She loves all things sugary-sweet and originally comes to Greendale to start a dessert bakery.
• Gossipy Hens: She and Jeff bond over their shared love of gossip in "Social Psychology".
• Heel–Face Turn: Did one as a 12-year-old girl, after making 10-year-old Jeff wet his pants and letting him run off in tears.
• Hidden Depths: For a supposedly clean-cut Christian woman, Shirley is hinted to have a surprising familiarity with the BDSM community. In "Paranormal Parentage" she recognizes immediately what Pierce's "special gym" is and what it's used for, and is also very keen that Troy forget that she knew what it was in the first place. Much to Abed's surprise, she's also a big fan of the Hellraiser movies, which frequently drew upon BDSM themes and imagery.
  • It's revealed in Season 4 that Shirley's in line to be the class valedictorian, apparently having even better grades than Annie.
• Hiding Behind Religion: Jeff accuses Shirley of this in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" when he learns that Shirley was his childhood bully. While he's (understandably) overwrought at the time and Shirley is a genuinely religious person, a good case can be made that this isn't actually that far off from the truth; she does tend to use her religious beliefs as a way of feeling superior to others, manipulating them into doing what she wants through guilt and avoiding having to address the less savory aspects of her personality (such as her volatile temper).
• Holier Than Thou: Shirley is both the most passionately religious member of the study group and the most insufferably self-righteous and judgmental about it. Unsurprisingly, the other members call her out for this when said beliefs insult them.
• Hypocrite: She's not nearly as moral and upstanding as she likes to think she is. She tries to grow out of it, with varying results.
• Hypocritical Humor: Shirley tends to produce this kind of humor, usually by comparing various beliefs/ideas/practices unfavorably to her religious beliefs only to then either engage in the same things herself or by inadvertently suggesting that her particular beliefs are similar to those she condemns in condemning them.
• Iconic Item: Her purse. Or, "comedically huge bag", as Abed calls it.
• Innocent Bigot: What she tries to pull off toward the members of the study group. It doesn't go so well, largely because her bigotry isn't quite as innocent as she likes to pretend.
  Shirley: [to Annie] I didn't know you were a... Jew?
• Ironic Echo: "That's less nice..." in "Modern Warfare".^note To be fair to Shirley, Jeff had explicitly stated his intention to take the prize—priority class registration for the next semester—for himself. However, when he wins the game, he does offer her the chance to take exclusively morning classes so that she can go home to spend more time with her children.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Although she can be a self-righteous ass to people especially in her younger years towards kids like Jeff, she does insist on being kind and is genuinely happy for anyone in the group when something 'nice' happens to them.
• Large Ham: Not nearly as often as Troy or Annie, though she has her moments.
  Shirley: Ooh! Troy made God mad!
• Manipulative Bitch: Whenever she uses religion, her Team Mom tendencies or, really, any predicament that befalls her as an excuse to get people to do as she wants.
  Jeff: Let me guess. I'm not going to make a pregnant woman storm off?
• Nice Girl: For all her faults and insensitivities, Shirley is shown to be a genuinely kind woman, who cares deeply for others, even when she may fundamentally disagree with them.
• Not So Above It All:
  • When Jeff gets into a fight in "Comparative Religion". At first, she is insistent on considering Jeff 'dead to her' if he goes to his fight, but later on she admits the bullies Jeff was facing deserved a nice whooping and gets into it herself. Along with the entire study group.
    Mike: What would Shirley do?
    Jeff: She would shake your hand and wish you a merry Christmas.
    [Mike slams Jeff down]
    Shirley: Jeffrey! Kick his ass.
  • This comes back brilliantly in the video game episode, where at first she is appalled at Annie killing a (virtual) blacksmith... but when his pregnant wife comes downstairs, Shirley sets her on fire and smashes her to death and quickly goes on to make sure the whole family is dead and that the house is completely destroyed once they leave.
• Odd Couple: Being a devoutly religious African-American homemaker and housewife, she tends to generate this kind of dynamic with Britta, who is almost her exact opposite in every way. Less so with Annie, whom she seems closer to, as they're quite similar in many ways.
• Odd Friendship: Develops this kind of relationship with Jeff. Comes to a head in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism", but they become even closer after the events of the episode.
• Out of Focus: Zig-zagged. Midway through Season 5 she complains about having not had much focus recently, only for the next two episodes to center heavily around her. Then she dips out of focus again.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Shirley's way of lashing out is to either try and guilt-trip whoever she believes has wronged her, or to smile sweetly and pour on the Sugary Malice — and sometimes both in combination.
• Politeness Judo: Her status as Team Mom gives her this ability. Case in point, the WWBJD bracelets.
• Put on a Bus: Departs in the final season premiere to take care of her sick father, though she technically comes Back for the Finale as part of two Imagine Spots.
• Religious Bruiser: The Token Religious Teammate of the group and a bonafide asskicker when the situation calls for it. See the group's fight with Mike's gang, the paintball tournaments, and the epic Pillows vs. Blankets war for examples.
• Sassy Black Woman:
  • Shirley is largely an aversion of this trope, as Yvette Brown points out in this roundtable interview that she and the show's other female regulars conducted during their last day of shooting for Season 3:
    Yvette Nicole Brown: As a black actor, it's refreshing that I'm not playing the 'sassy black woman.' It's something that Dan Harmon was cognizant of from the beginning. It is something that I'm always cognizant of. Every woman on the planet has sass and smart-ass qualities in them, but it seems sometimes only black women are defined by it. Shirley is a fully formed woman that had a sassy moment. Her natural set point, if anything, is rage. That's her natural set point, suppressed rage, which comes out as kindness and trying to keep everything tight."
  • In "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux", the Dean asks her to be more "happy/threatening". She responds accordingly.
    Shirley: The word he's looking for is "sassy." [her smile fades] He'd better pray he don't find it.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Her attempt to rebuild her life anew fails. While she is a good baker and has decent intuition, she runs a loss on Shirley's Sandwiches, causing Andre to divorce her again and win custody of the kids. That also puts a torpedo in her love life, since she believes you should only sleep with the person you married. Then her father gets sick, putting her back into a domestic role.
• Share Phrase: Her and Annie's dual "Awwwwww!"
• Shipper on Deck: For Jeff and Britta, initially. The events of the Season 2 premiere quickly put an end to it.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Usually motherly and sweet, but can go from that to sassy in a second.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: The Stick. As the Token Religious Teammate, Shirley sometimes has a Holier Than Thou attitude and often tries to force the rest of the main characters to adhere to her morals.
• Stepford Smiler: On the mild side of the trope, but she has 'thinly veiled rage issues' under her cheer.*
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: In her case she's a lot heavier on the sugar than on the ice; Shirley's default attitude is an affable and loving sweetness — but cross her, and she's cold. Often she retains the mask of sweetness but doesn't bother to hide the undertone of poison.
• Surprise Pregnancy: In Season 2, after a brief (and memory-wiped) fling with Chang.
• Team Chef: She's the one who mostly brings food (specifically brownies) for the group, whether they want it or not.
• Team Mom: Again, whether the group wants it or not.
• Third-Option Love Interest: What she wants to be for Jeff, besides Annie and Britta. In fact, she makes no secret of her belief that Jeff is physically attractive.
• Token Religious Teammate: The member of the group who brings up religion and her strong faith the most.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the Season 2 finale. She takes out several of the enemy by dousing the school in paint and later almost wins the game, only being outlasted by Pierce.
• Tsundere: Far less violent than most examples (not that she doesn't have her moments), and with "dere-dere" rather than "tsun-tsun" as her default state. Few characters slip into Beware the Nice Ones so easily as Shirley.
• Unreliable Narrator: Concerning her marriage. In Season 1, almost every reference she makes to her husband centers around what a complete and utterly irredeemable bastard he is for cheating on her. Given that when we finally meet him he turns out to be a pretty decent guy genuinely contrite about having an affair, in addition to it being revealed that Shirley had problems with alcohol in her past, it can be safely assumed that Shirley is exaggerating and may not be as faultless in the original breakdown of her marriage as previously suggested.
• Verbal Tic:
  • It's quite obvious when Shirley is lying, as she enunciates her lies with very clipped, forced-out syllables, such as when the group is attempting an I Am Spartacus moment after Jeff farted during a mock UN debate.
    Shirley: I far-ted.
  • After Shirley and Annie have "accidentally" murdered the video game Blacksmith and his Wife in "Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne" and have rigged their home to burn down, after stealing every last piece of equipment in the building and ensuring there were no other "loose ends".
    Shirley: Hel-lo!
    Annie: Everybody go shopping? [nervously] 'Cause that's all we did! [the blacksmith's house begins burning down in the background]
    Abed: Is that hut on fire? [Hilda begins running around in a panic as her parents' house burns]
    Shirley: [deadpan] Ohhh myyy, what an un-ex-plained tra-ge-dy.
  • She also tends to adopt an exaggeratedly chipper sing-song tone whenever trying to manipulate anyone. Both tics are pointed out by Jeff on one occasion:
    Shirley: Hel-lo!
    Jeff: Are you here to help me with Biology or to get me to help you?
    Shirley: [singsong] Bi-ol-o-gy.
    Jeff: Are you lying? [Shirley looks cornered] Hard to put the word 'yes' into lilting syllables, huh?
    Shirley: Ye-eh-es?
• Weight Woe: Shirley, followed closely by Jeff, is the study group member most often shown concerned about their weight.
• Younger than She Looks: Only two years older than Jeff but her fussiness doesn't help.

Annie Edison

Annie Edison

"I'm Annie Edison, but people call me Psycho because I had a nervous breakdown in high school."

Played By: Alison Brie

Debut: "Pilot"

"A passing grade? Like a 'C'? Why don't I just get pregnant at a bus station?!"

An insecure and neurotic overachiever attending Greendale following an addiction to prescription medication which ruined her previously flawless high-school record. Intelligent and driven, she's usually perky and cheerful but tends to get tightly-wound and uptight when things fail to go to plan or when matters of grades or academic achievement arise.

---

• Abusive Parents: While not a lot is known about her relationship with her father, her mother was known to push her very hard to succeed while simultaneously belittling her.
  Annie: Pierce, I'm gonna tell you what my mother told me when I wanted to quit cheerleading: "You're not very pretty, you have no boobs, and you can't make a basket toss to save your life, but you made a commitment!"
• Action Girl: Despite her stature, she's been proven to have at least some physical strength (she slams Jeff's head into a table in one episode, and punches him so hard he bleeds in another) and is capable of impressive athletic feats, particularly in paintball episodes.
• Aesop Amnesia: Many times she realizes that her attraction to Jeff is not healthy, that does not prevent her from falling in love with him again.
• Affectionate Nickname: Vaughn calls her "mountain flower" when they're dating. She and Jeff sometimes call each other "milady" and "milord."
• Age-Gap Romance: She and Jeff are sixteen years apart.
• All Love Is Unrequited:
  • Her crush on Troy that she's had since high school. When he remains totally oblivious to her, she decides to get over it.
  • Her crush on Jeff is a series of starts and stops, though how much so varies between episodes.
• All of the Other Reindeer: She appears to have been on the receiving end of this trope a lot during high school.
• Ambiguously Bi: Her only confirmed relationships are with males, but she also seems very eager to kiss Britta near the end of "Early 21st Romanticism". And then there's her very detailed sex scene with a female elf maid during her stint as Hector The Well Endowed in "Advanced Dungeons And Dragons".
• Ambition Is Evil: Played with; Annie does have a tendency to let her ambitions override her morals, but it's never suggested that her ambitions themselves are bad, per se.
• Anchored Ship: Her relationship with Jeff does not develop much over the course of six seasons.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The youngest of the group^note she initially thought she and Troy were the same age, but it turns out Troy was Held Back in School. Interestingly, Brie is actually older than Donald Glover and only two months younger than Gillian Jacobs. She's also a wide-eyed cutie whom everyone is fond of.
• The B Grade: She's extremely grade-conscious, to the point of her quest for a better grade forming the main thrust of several episodes, particularly "Basic Lupine Urology".
• Badass Adorable: In the paintball episodes. There are other instances though; in the climatic fight scene in "Comparative Religion," she can be seen viciously whaling on three different opponents and winning.
  • In "Paradigms of Human Memory," she's shown to be a purple belt in jujitsu.
  • In "Accounting for Lawyers", she chloroforms a janitor twice and almost does the same to Jeff.
  • In "Analysis Of Cork Based Networking", she jumps on the back of a man more than twice her size and starts choking him before Jeff pulls her off.
  • Downplayed in later seasons, though not in a Chickification kind of way. She starts making an effort to dress and act more mature, and the other characters react accordingly — she's still a badass, but she's not quite "adorable" anymore.
• Beautiful All Along:
  • She's an interesting version of this, as rather than being called homely, she's accepted as being 'cute' most of the time, but goes to a more sexy appearance by Letting Her Hair Down.
    Jeff: Annie's pretty young. We try not to sexualize her.
  • In another odd example, Troy is actually unaware that Annie is attractive until Jeff points it out to him. Then again, Troy is not exactly the brains of the operation. And he did say that that his high school memories with her blurred out her current beauty.
• Beautiful Tears: Annie has what Jeff considers a "Disney face" when she gets upset. When she starts tearing up after the group gets mad at her, Jeff yells at them not to look at her because the sight of her sobbing is cute and will eat away at their resolve.
  Jeff: ...Her lip is going to quiver and her eyes will flutter but they won't ever actually close, but do not feel sorry for her!
• Berserk Button: Being called "Little Annie Adderall", or taking her pen.
• Betty and Veronica: The Betty to Britta's Veronica for Jeff's Archie.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • As "The Science of Illusion", "Anthropology 101", "Accounting For Lawyers" and "A Fistful of Paintballs"/"For a Few Paintballs More" demonstrate, irking Annie Edison is not recommended. She can get... aggressive.
  • Annie has no issues taking down a man twice her size with chloroform... twice. And she seems totally prepared to do it to Jeff, too.
  • She has punched Jeff in the face and slammed his head into a table.
• Book Smart: As she puts it: "I know you're all wondering how I do it. How do I balance straight A's, extracurriculars, and Israeli folk dancing every Friday night?"
• Bound and Gagged: As part of a classroom reenactment of an Indian Princess' kidnapping in the second episode.
• Brainy Brunette: She has brown hair and is the most studious of the study group.
• Bridezilla: She's all but building up to be one, judging how she seems to have a huge scrapbook on wedding preparations handy.
• Character Catchphrase: Her gasping.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She does this to Jeff at the start of Season 2, after they kiss and he doesn't call her back.
• The Conscience: To Jeff. With just her Puppy-Dog Eyes alone she can convince him to do the right thing.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Prim and young Annie is usually wearing a brightly-patterned blouse or dress, sometimes paired with a cardigan.
• Covert Pervert: Annie is seen as the young and wholesome member of the group, but there are many instances of her displaying surprising perversion.
  • In "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons," Annie ends up playing the character "Hector the Well-Endowed" during a Dungeons & Dragons game, due to grabbing a character sheet at random. She then ends up seducing an elf maiden, and Abed makes her describe the process in full detail. Music plays over the narration so that we don't get to hear what she says, but if you read her lips you can see that it is filthy. The camera cuts to Troy a few times, furiously taking notes.
  • While the rest of the study group is averting their eyes from Jeff's nakedness during his showdown with the Pool Professor, Annie sneaks a few peeks.
  • She also suggests that Jeff change his shirt because "it's not working", but really it's just to sneak a peek of his chest.
• Coy, Girlish Flirt Pose: Quite unintentionally, as it turns out. Britta calls her out on this, claiming that she's "selling out her gender", which Annie does not take lightly.
• Cute Bookworm: Especially in the first season.
• Cute and Psycho: A benign variety, but Annie has been shown to be one failing grade, lousy party, missing pen, or bad round of model United Nations from a complete mental breakdown.
• The Cutie: Annie is the living, breathing embodiment of this trope.
• Dude Magnet: Besides Jeff, many men have expressed attraction towards her.
• Embarrassing Nickname: "Little Annie Adderall", due to her high school pill addiction.
• Everyone Is Christian at Christmas: Dons a sexy Ms. Santa outfit, albeit to lure Jeff into the seedy world of a cappella singing.
• Flanderization: Her passive-aggressive competitiveness with Shirley reaches new heights during the gas leak year.
• Fanservice Pack: Goes from being a cute and preppy girl with the occasional moments of being Beautiful All Along to the show's primary Ms. Fanservice.
• The Finicky One: Starts out this way, but becomes more fun-loving and relaxed as time goes on.
• Formerly Fat: She claims to have lost a lot of weight since high school, but it's mostly an Informed Attribute, as noted below.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Choleric.
• Girliness Upgrade: Applied and then semi-inverted. Annie starts off dressing like a normal 18-year-old, then gradually begins wearing flowery dresses and cardigans more often, to the point that they comprise the bulk of her wardrobe. Come Season 5, Annie's wardrobe has undergone a major overhaul to better fit her being more assertive and mature, with her wearing sweaters over blouses and pants.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: She seems to have quite a healthy collection of them.
• Go-Getter Girl: She's a female college student who's ambitious and quite the perfectionist. She'll participate in any extracurricular activity (fundraising, debate, model UN, running for Student Council President) not just for the credentials, but because she genuinely believes it'll improve the school in some way.
• Has a Type: Annie is attracted to aloof, emotionally distant men in general, and especially men who need her in some way so that she can ensure they won't leave her. This leads to some overlap with Britta's type, but not much. For the most part, Annie's type manifests as Jeff. She's initially attracted to Troy before he outgrows his Jerk Jock phase, Vaughn for being detached from the world, the Dark Rider in the second paintball episode for being a badass Bounty Hunter-type, Abed when he's playing Jeff's archetype (especially when he plays Han Solo), and of course Jeff himself. She even gets hot and bothered when the Dean is pretending to have switched bodies with Jeff, even though Annie wasn't aware of what he was doing.
  Shirley: What is happening with you?
  Annie: I don't know.
• Hidden Buxom: Her breasts are initially downplayed as much as possible by having her carry books and other stuff as well as wearing cardigans.
• Hidden Depths: She's a lot more mature and observant than she lets on, particularly from the third season on. She recognizes her attraction to Jeff for what it is, and was able to understand and reach Abed on a level that even Troy couldn't.
• Horrible Housing: Because her parents cut her off after her stint in rehab, Annie spends the first two seasons and part of the third in a crappy studio apartment above a sex shop in a terrible neighborhood. One episode shows she is often woken up in the middle of the night by Dildopolis' announcements, and violent events outside it are frequently alluded to. Her bad living situation is eventually rectified when she moves in with Troy and Abed in season 3.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: With her younger brother, Anthony.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: When Annie has to be another character's assistant on something, she is usually much more competent than the person she is helping.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: Her reason for trying to be the Cowboy Cop to Shirley's By-the-Book Cop when both become security guards at the school. Shirley seems to think it should be the other way around.
• Informed Judaism: Like with Abed being a Muslim, the fact that she is Jewish only really comes up in Christmas episodes.
• The Ingenue: She gives this impression, and it's mostly true (some subversive personal history notwithstanding).
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Annie has light blue eyes that reflect her relative naïveté.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: She used to wear back braces so she sticks her chest out a lot. In the episode "Accounting for Lawyers" there is a moment where Troy and Abed are caught looking at her breasts when she is shaking her chest.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Annie can come off as being overly competitive, nagging and judgmental, but it's mostly a front for her own neuroses, and she's a very nice and caring person underneath it all.
• Jewish and Nerdy: Annie is Jewish and is a dorky grade-obsessed perfectionist.
• Last Girl Wins: Subverted. Jeff admits he's in love with her in the series finale, but since she decides to leave Greendale to pursue an internship in the FBI they don't end up together.
• Likes Older Men: Most of the men she shows romantic interest in are quite a bit older than she is, notably Jeff, Rich, and Vaughn.
• Loving a Shadow: She admits in "Virtual Systems Analysis" that she isn't actually in love with Jeff, but rather, the idea of loving him and being able to change him for the better.
• Morality Pet:
  • To Pierce; he openly admits that she's his favorite of the group and generally, if he reveals a nicer, more generous or decent side to his personality, Annie will be involved somehow.
  • She is also this to Jeff which feeds into their Ship Tease.
• Ms. Fanservice: For a series that tries not to sexualize her, Annie certainly does seem to get wet, dirty, endure Clothing Damage and get undressed quite a bit. Not to mention the fact that she's the program's go-to girl for fetishy costumes.
• Obsessed Are the Listmakers: Occasionally seen making long and elaborate to-do lists. She also has a huge binder for ideas and progress for the group's "Save Greendale" committee in Seasons 5 and 6.
• The Ophelia: Especially back in her Adderall days.
• Parental Abandonment: Annie going to rehab for her Adderall addiction resulted in her being estranged from her family, who would rather have pretended the whole ordeal never happened.
• Plucky Girl: She also doesn't give up easily and is very optimistic.
• The Pollyanna: This trope could just as easily be called 'The Annie'. Lampshaded by Jeff, who actually calls her "Pollyanna" at one point.
• Progressively Prettier: As shown in flashbacks in "Heroic Origins". She goes from having curly unkempt hair, braces, and glasses in high school, to straight hair and glasses by the end of the summer, to finally looking like she does in the present day.
• Proper Tights With Skirt: In the first four seasons.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: A signature of hers, variably described by Jeff as the "Disney Face" and "Hello Kitty stare". She definitely knows how to use 'em, too.
  Jeff: You're becoming dangerous, Annie. It's those doe-eyes. Disappointing you is like choking The Little Mermaid with a bike chain.
• Self-Proclaimed Love Interest: Jeff considers Annie to be this, even when this is not completely one-sided.
• Seriously Scruffy: In one of the documentary episodes, the Dean gets Annie to work as a script supervisor while he directs a commercial. He suffers from a severe case of Sanity Slippage, and after several days of putting up with his increasingly bizarre demands, Annie is completely out of it and ungroomed. She rationalizes the Dean's behavior because she doesn't want to admit that she's wasted several weeks of her life helping him.
• Sexy Santa Dress: She wears one in "Regional Holiday Music." Also, the scene in question includes Baby Talk (A la Betty Boop), Brainless Beauty (Pretending that as a Jew she knows nothing about Christmas) and Everyone Is Christian at Christmas (Sarcastically inverted in the lyrics).
• Sexy Sweater Girl: Cardigans appear to make up about half of her wardrobe. Lampshaded by Britta who accuses her of using her sexy school girl routine to raise more money for charity: "I'm Annie, ooh, my sweaters just keep shrinking."
• Share Phrase: Her and Shirley's dual "Awwwwww!"
• Ship Tease: Exaggerated Trope. She has years of heavily teased Unresolved Sexual Tension with Jeff. The finale doesn't definitively answer it one way or the other. In it, Jeff acknowledges his feelings for Annie but recognizes that her opportunity to leave Greendale for an internship with the FBI is too good to pass up. At her suggestion, they end up sharing a kiss before she leaves. It's left open as to whether or not she will return sometime in the near future.
  Jeff: ... We were just saying goodbye to the room.
  Annie: For Season 6. Season 7, who knows? It's out of our hands. Too many variables.
• Shipper on Deck: In Season 3, she's all for Troy and Britta getting together.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: The Square. Annie is a kind-hearted, former overachiever/Go-Getter Girl who is often the voice of reason amidst wackiness, though her own neuroses are also a source of comedy.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: She is considered a World Class Beauty, although initially seems to be an example of Hollywood Homely. As the series progresses, many characters notice how beautiful she really is, to the point of being distracted by her appearance.
• The Smart Girl: The most intelligent of the group and the one most concerned with studying and grades.
• Supporting Leader: In the last two seasons. While Jeff is nominally the leader of the Save Greendale committee, it is Annie who often takes charge and does most of the actual work.
• Sycophantic Servant: Annie tends to gravitate towards whoever's in charge in order to feel helpful/wanted, insinuating herself as their Dragon or helper. She usually resets by the end of the episode.
• Teacher's Pet: She mentions to Jeff she was the least popular student in high school because of this trope. And apparently she can't let go of this deep-seeded habit. For instance, in "Physical Education", instead of putting his binder back, Señor Chang drops it on the floor and orders Annie to pick it up.
• Third-Option Love Interest: For Jeff in "Pascal's Triangle Revisited" — after spending most of the season trying to choose between Britta and Prof. Slater, he realizes only at the last second that Annie is the only girl he has real Unresolved Sexual Tension with. In later seasons, Jeff and Britta are Better as Friends, Slater is gone entirely, and Annie is generally treated by the writers as Jeff's main Love Interest for all intents and purposes.
• Took a Level in Badass: Annie is the second of the group to be eliminated during the paintball game in "Modern Warfare", but by the time Season 2's Western-themed "A Fistful of Paintballs" rolls around she's become a one-woman killing machine, dropping no less than ten opponents single-handedly on-screen, a higher kill total than the rest of the group combined. "Remedial Chaos Theory" reveals that she carries around a gun due to living in a bad neighborhood, which may also explain why Annie became such a crack shot with paintball guns — she's been practicing with real ones.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: At the end of the fifth season, she decides to give up on Jeff and soon after Jeff realizes that he is in love with her.
• Verbal Tic: Her little half-gasp, half-squeak of indignant horror whenever she's shocked or offended.
• Vocal Evolution: Her voice gets noticeably less high-pitched and little-girl-ish as the series goes on.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: It's implied at times that a lot of Annie's issues (including her pill addiction) stem from overly demanding, hypercritical parents, her mother especially, whose expectations she could never hope to meet.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: She calls herself "Irony-Free Annie" for a very good reason.

Troy Barnes

Troy Barnes

"Did you know that Gogurt is just yogurt?"

Played By: Donald Glover

Debut: "Pilot"

"Sometimes I think I lost something really important to me, and it turns out I already ate it."

A charismatic but not-incredibly-intelligent high-school football star who decided to attend Greendale after he suffered an injury that put a halt to him having a college football career. Despite seeming like a typical jock at first, he quickly starts to show his nerdy side after he becomes best friends with Abed due to their shared love of pop culture and goofy antics.

---

• Age-Gap Romance: In Season 4, he dates Britta, who is nine years his senior.
• Ambiguously Bi: His friendship with Abed is so strong that when Troy and Britta are dating he seems to pay more attention to Abed than to his girlfriend. Also confesses to having a Celeb Crush on Clive Owen, to the point that he "might just as well be attracted to him".
  Troy: [to Abed] Let's go film the sex scene.
• "Aww"-choo: He sneezes like a cute little girl, a fact he's ashamed about. He goes so far as to get lessons on giving a powerful sneeze from Pierce in a Sensei for Scoundrels scenario.
  Jeff: Hey! Troy sneezes like a girl!
  Troy: And how 'bout I pound you like a boy—that didn't come out right.
• Bad Liar: Troy is terrible at improvising lies when put on the spot.
  • When a janitor catches him snooping around a lawyer's office, Troy can only stick his hand out and say "I can explain..." twice without ever coming up with an explanation.
  • During the Thanksgiving Episode, Abed gets the idea of getting food poisoning from eating two-year-old seven-layer-dip so they can leave Shirley's party. When Shirley catches them in the act:
    Annie:: Shirley, we were just...
    Abed: About to...
    Troy: Eat garbage dip. Why did I have to go third?
• Better as Friends: How his relationship with Britta comes to an end.
• Betty and Veronica: The Betty to Jeff's Veronica for Britta's Archie.
• Black and Nerdy: His friendship with Abed brings out his inner geek.
• Book Dumb: At least in the beginning.
• Breakout Character: Started out as the least focused-on member of the cast before his popular dynamic with Abed and Donald Glover's performance made him into one of the series' most beloved characters.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: One of his defining traits. Despite being highly charismatic and very talented at many different things, he has difficulty accepting the responsibilities that will inevitably come with embracing those talents—which often leaves him aimless, and searching for a purpose. Over the course of the show, he turns down a football scholarship, a career as a plumber, and his destiny as "The Truest Repairman".
• Celeb Crush: When Jeff, speaking about Troy's friendship with Abed, insists that Troy's identity has been "consumed by his relationship with another man", Troy thinks Jeff is referring to his Clive Owen Tumblr.
• Character Catchphrase: "You just wrinkled my brain" and "He/She is like the (insert terrible thing here) of people".
• Character Development: The most noticeable example on the series (except for Jeff); starts off as immature and obsessed with popularity, but becomes a responsible and kind young man who's able to hold the group together in trying times.
• Characterization Marches On: Season 1 depicted Troy as being an obsessive sports jock with no other interests other than what he could accomplish through his athletics. Later seasons have him act far more nerdy and less self-absorbed, with his interest in sports completely vanishing.
• The Chosen One: He's "The Truest Repairman," who was prophesized by his school to repair men as he does Air Conditioners.
• Closet Geek: Heavily implied. Troy is introduced as a stereotypical jock character before his wacky self comes through after being paired with Abed.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Definitely one of the more wacky and eccentric members of the group, at least around Abed.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: To Abed, who is definitely the more odd and irresponsible of the two.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Notably, Troy is the only member of the study group who genuinely has no idea what he wants to do with the rest of his life when he gets out of Greendale. Jeff wants to resume his career as a lawyer, Britta wants to be a psychologist, Annie wants to be a hospital administrator, Abed wants to be a filmmaker, Shirley wants to start a business, and even Pierce (who's retired) wants to be an entrepreneur. Troy, however, turns down three separate career paths over the course of the show, and never really figures out a new path for himself. He accepts Pierce's offer to travel around the world because he believes that it might help him find one.
• Dork Knight: An acclaimed high school athlete and part of the show's resident Cloud Cuckoo Lander duo with Abed.
• Dumb Jock: A classic example. God bless him, he is not the brightest bulb in the box.
  Jeff: I want you to clear your mind.
  Troy: [immediately] Done.
• Everyone Has Standards: Troy is definitely not above eccentricities and bizarre escapades, as shown by his interactions with Abed. However, even he is weirded out by the cult-like nature of the AC Repair School.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Sanguine.
• Genius Ditz: He's a plumbing and air-conditioning-repair prodigy. Not that he wants to do either of those things. The end of Season 3 ultimately sees him embrace his gift for air-conditioning repair.
• The Heart: He is easily the sweetest and most morally "pure" member of the group, and often mediates conflict or tries to stop the others from resorting to violence. It's quite notable that on the few occasions it's suggested or looked like he's about to leave, things have fallen apart for everyone very quickly. Though it should be noted that even he has his moments of weakness, as it is Troy who suggests killing Annie after she reveals that she sabotaged the space simulation.
• Held Back in School: He had to repeat the fifth grade. His mom tried to make him feel better by telling him that everyone has a hard time with fifth grade and that he wasn't going to age a year.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Abed, who he refers to as his "other half".
• Hidden Depths: Has a talent for mechanical maintenance and is a phenomenal (interpretive) dancer.
• Hollywood Jehovah's Witness: Averted. He is one of Jehovah's Witnesses and this is often referenced and demonstrated in that he doesn't celebrate Christmas or birthdays. However, you otherwise couldn't tell that he was a Witness if he didn't say so.
  Troy: Yeah, but we don't celebrate birthdays or Christmas and we can't drink. But it helps.
• Jerk Jock: He's more Lovable Jock now but apparently in high school, and to a degree in the early episodes of the show, Troy wasn't without his Jerkass side, as demonstrated in "Football, Feminism and You" when a chance to join the Greendale football team ends up with him strutting around in a self-obsessed manner lambasting people at random with his "politically conservative high school's shamefully outdated fight rap(s)."
• Large Ham: The member of the group most prone to crying or yelling.
  • This is best exemplified by the time he met Levar Burton.
• The Leader: He occasionally supplants Jeff in the role. Unlike Jeff, he's a clear Type II.
• Lovable Jock: Definitely by mid-Season 1, though he becomes less of a jock as time goes on.
• Malaproper: Some of his gems include "all tomato" (ultimatum), "escape goat" (scapegoat) and "juggle knob" (juggernaut).
• Manchild: Troy's last year of high school he witnesses Annie scream during a party "Everyone's a robot!" as she ran through a window. As a result, it seems Troy remains a man-child out of fear. Shortly after Annie's dramatic departure Troy faked an injury by doing a keg flip. Troy's fake injury guaranteed that he could remain in his comfort zone as a man-child a little while longer. By delaying manhood he could continue to live a fun care-free life and not become an adult weighed down by the responsibilities of life thus becoming a robot. During a wedding Troy and Abed make an agreement not to act "weird". However, "weird" is really code for their childlike behaviors. When Troy sees the the monkey which he named "Annie's Boobs" run into the air ducts, he uses this as an excuse to escape the conformity (robot behaviors) of the adults around him. Abed would have continued with his appropriate adult like behaviors at the wedding had it not been for Troy pulling him back into the comfort of behaving like children together.
• Meaningful Name: The name "Troy" means "soldier"; Troy is certainly loyal enough, and he almost always joins in on whatever adventure the group embarks on in any given episode. What does Abed cast Troy as in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"? A toy soldier.
• Messianic Archetype: He's apparently this for the air-conditioning repair school. Much to his bemusement.
• Mr. Fanservice: Not to the extent that Jeff is, but Troy does get a few moments here and there—namely, spending all of the Season 2 Halloween Episode shirtless.
• Nice Guy: The friendliest and most good-natured of the seven and the least likely to play an antagonistic role within the group.
• Oblivious to Love: He is completely clueless to Annie's obsession with him for years. Ironically, Troy later finds himself in Annie's shoes when Britta is oblivious to his crush.
• Only Sane Man: A weird example. Troy is often shown to be an enormous Cloud Cuckoo Lander and man child, but only when interacting with Abed. When Abed's not around, Troy is often the most normal member of the group. Also for the other members of the Air Conditioning Repair Annex, who are too caught up in their weird little cult.
• Popular Is Dumb: A ditzy former high school jock and prom king.
• Proud to Be a Geek: Part of his character arc in the early seasons is coming to terms with his newfound nerdiness and realizing there's nothing wrong with it. Particularly in "Epidemiology", when his attempt at a Halloween costume drives women away and Troy retreats into acting like a stuck-up jock again before deciding to embrace being a geek to save the school from a Zombie Apocalypse. Despite everyone's memory being wiped by the army at the end of the episode, the lesson sticks, and Troy is firmly proud of his geekiness for the rest of the series.
• Put on a Bus: Only appears in the first five episodes of Season 5 before leaving to sail around the world with LeVar Burton. They are captured by Mexican Gulf pirates the next episode as noted in a background newsfeed.
• Real Men Don't Cry: Averted, he cries often. Then lampshaded by Troy himself in "Mixology Certification" by his reaction to getting a birthday cake with Jehovah's Witness-appropriate language.
  Troy: [reading] "Hello during a random dessert, the month and day of which coincide numerically with your expulsion from a uterus." You guys, I never cry, but...
• Relationship Upgrade: With Britta between Seasons 3 and 4.
• Saying Too Much: He does this at least twice, adding "Whoops/Oops" without actually changing his tone.
  • When the Dean is mad at them for making an anus the school flag.
    Troy: How do you know it was our design? We submitted it anonymously. Whoops.
  • When trying to keep Britta away from her ex-boyfriend.
    Troy: You don't like your movie, we can't say the word Blade, there's phones in the refrigerator, ooops.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: His usual reaction to any crisis is to start screaming and crying like a six-year-old girl. Usually accompanied with a jumpy little tantrum.
  Troy: I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO MY WHOLE BRAIN IS CRYING.
• Secretly Earmarked for Greatness: after displaying natural gifts in machine repair in the first two seasons, season three features Troy being targeted for recruitment by Greendale's shadowy "Air Conditioner Repair School" which brings in so much money that its vice-dean, Robert Laybourne, is even more powerful than the dean. After initially resisting them because it would mean leaving his friends, he accepts their offer to join in order for their help in rescuing his friends during the season's penultimate episode. In the season finale, he turns out to be their version of The Chosen One after Laybourne is murdered and earns his way back out of the program by defeating the vice-dean's murderer/usurper in an air conditioner repair duel. It Makes Sense in Context for the most part...
  Vice-Dean Laybourne: "That's what we do Troy! Incredible, invisible, in-believable things where an unseen, unknown, un-vincible fraternity of craftsmen, graduates of this school, are guaranteed lucrative employment for their entire lives and I'm inviting you to join us."
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: The Goofball. Troy is a lighthearted Manchild who oscillates between ditziness and unexpected brilliance. He goes along with Abed's fantasy zaniness and has his own wacky tendencies, like his relationship with a monkey he named Annie's Boobs or inexplicable inferiority complex towards LeVar Burton.
• Stepford Smiler: In high school.
  Troy: I was forced to smile when I didn't feel like it.
• Tender Tears: Troy cries incredibly easily, and is, to quote Abed, "deeply ashamed of the fact."
• Took a Level in Dumbass: A mild example, considering he was not bright to begin with. He goes from being a standard Dumb Jock to believing the study room table is a magical force that keeps everyone's books from falling to the floor, among other examples.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He evolves from an arrogant Jerk Jock to The Heart of the study group.
• Token Black Friend: Pierce invokes this trope by pointing out that his life has meaning now that he has a young African-American friend.
• Twofer Token Minority: African-American Jehovah's Witness.
• Uncertain Doom: A news report mentions that he and LeVar Burton were captured by Somali pirates.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: Briefly with Annie.
• Walking the Earth: His final appearance has him sailing across the world with LeVar Burton.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Has a deathly fear of rats.

Pierce Hawthorne

Piercinald Anastasia "Pierce" Hawthorne

"I was never one to hold grudges, Jeffrey. My father held grudges. I'll always hate him for that."

Played By: Chevy Chase

Debut: "Pilot"

"I'll show you the tool most important to our survival. Fair warning — it's my penis."

The oldest member of the study group; a local curmudgeon and a wealthy but lonely tycoon who attends Greendale primarily to find company and give himself something to do. Not nearly as smart or popular as he thinks, he tends to act inappropriately and thus come across as racist, sexist and buffoonish.

---

• Accidental Misnaming: Pierce routinely mispronounces Abed's name as "Ay-bed".
• Adam Westing: Up until the beginning of 2011 or so, Chevy Chase was absolutely notorious for being difficult to work with. He briefly turned it around, but Pierce's general Jerkassness can be seen as him essentially playing who he thinks he used to be. Alternatively, this could be seen as the producers of the show lampooning Chase, since several behind-the-scenes reports (most notably the feud between Chase and Dan Harmon, although the same reports in that case also suggested that Harmon himself wasn't exactly blameless in the situation either) have suggested that Chase isn't exactly the easiest person to work with or the most popular person on set.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: An in-universe example; the characters themselves go backwards and forwards on whether Pierce is just an irredeemable Jerkass or whether it's the fact that people treat him like a fool that makes him act out that way. Jeff usually takes the former interpretation, Annie the latter.
• Ambiguously Bi: For all of his homophobia and calling Jeff gay, he is annoyed when Abed says that there’s no special connection between the two of them in "Paradigms Of Human Memory".
  • Not to mention his comments in Remedial Chaos Theory about pizza guys getting worse and worse looking, with all the good ones going into porn.
  • In one episode, he asks the rest of the study group if he has a shot with any of them, and is disappointed when they all shake their heads.
• And Starring: And Chevy Chase during the opening credits.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: He considers himself the guy who does or says what everyone else wants, but isn't willing to.
• Berserk Button: A double subversion occurs in "Accounting for Lawyers" when Pierce fails to guess another man's Berserk Button, but in fact has just mentioned his own—his hair loss.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With City College Dean Spreck in Season 2.
• Bondage Is Bad: While he's not evil, he is a Dirty Old Man, and the fact that he has a "secret gym" in his mansion only reinforces this image.
• Brick Joke: He hires LeVar Burton to meet Troy as an act of revenge in Season 2, knowing that it would cause Troy to freak out and leave him in a catatonic state during the entirety of Burton's visit. During Season 5, Burton returns, this time on a more heartwarming note, hired by Pierce posthumously to help oversee Troy's journey when he leaves Greendale.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: While Pierce is strange, bigoted, and more than a little clueless, he's occasionally shown that he is actually a fairly competent businessman.
• Bus Crash: He's revealed to have died off-screen in "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics".
• Butt-Monkey: If it's not Britta, it is Pierce who typically serves this role within the study group, as lampshaded in "The Art of Discourse".
  • Season 2 deconstructs this; His resentment over his status as the group Butt Monkey causes him to lash out and antagonize the rest of the study group and other students to an increasingly disturbing degree.
• Casanova Wannabe: When he tries to hit on Shirley. He alternates between this and Kavorka Man, however.
• Character Development: Much of Season 3 involves him making up to his friends for his atrocious behavior in Season 2. He admits Jeff has ample reasons to hate him and decides to be the group's bad guy for his sake.
  • Parodied in "Introduction to Finality":
  Alan: [to Jeff] This place has made you so gay.
  Pierce: Hey! Don't use gay as a derogatory term. Boo-yah, good person.
• Characterization Marches On: The first few episodes had him dressed more suavely with a slight Casanova Wanna Be gig going on. He also showed relatively few Innocent Bigot traits than he would later on. It took only a few episodes for him to get into his established persona, however.
• Church of Happyology: He describes himself as a Neo-Buddhist, but his actual beliefs put him more in this camp.
• Cloudcuckoolander: By Season 3 due to senility.
• Comically Missing the Point: So very very much.
• Cosmic Plaything: When Pierce was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, both of his arms, and one of his ankles. The doctors eventually stopped trying to deliver him and just started laughing.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: When he really puts his mind to it, ^note usually when he's either trying to get back at the rest of the study group for some real or imagined slight or trying to get back in their good graces after pissing them off one time too many, Pierce is a devious Manipulative Bastard and a master of the Batman Gambit. The rest of the time, well...
• Deadpan Snarker: He doesn't get as many zingers as, say, Jeff, but still gets in a couple of good ones.
  Jeff: There is no "Jeff and Britta"!
  Pierce: He said, fully erect.
• Death Equals Redemption: Subverted. The group was willing to leave his memory in peace, until he turned them against each other with a posthumous polygraph test. Jeff eventually admitted that they could mourn Pierce while acknowledging he was an ass in life.
• Death by Irony: In his will, he leaves each member of the study group a canister of his frozen sperm. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that filling these canisters caused him to die of dehydration.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Pierce can be considered a deconstruction of the "wacky old person" character. His insensitivity makes him seem like a Jerkass, his out-of-touch outlook gets him ostracized, and his attempts to fit in turn him into an unlikeable Attention Whore. He can also be seen as a deconstruction of typical sitcom Butt-Monkey characters like Jerry, Scully, and Zoidberg; usually the oldest character in the group, lots of self-esteem issues, considered out of touch and uncool, and almost always the butt of everyone else's jokes to the point of being a Chew Toy. Pierce shows how this sort of treatment can eventually foster serious resentment from whoever's on the receiving end until things get ugly. Pierce lashes out at the group in increasingly mean-spirited, disturbing ways, in large part because of this treatment (he even says as much). Not that he doesn't bring it on himself most of the time, but he isn't really antagonistic until the group's treatment of him gets worse.
• Demoted to Extra: In Season 4, he's lucky to get five minutes of screen time.
• Determinator: Surprisingly enough, Pierce is not one to throw in the towel easily. It's something he has in common with Britta, hence why he decides to help her out in "Herstory of Dance".
  Pierce: If I ever let being bad at something stop me, I wouldn't even be here. That thing some men call failure, I call living. Breakfast. And I'm not leaving till I've cleaned out the buffet.
• Dirty Old Man: He openly and hopelessly lusts after the female members of the study group (particularly Shirley, at least early on), all of whom are much younger than he is.
  Pierce: So, just to be clear, I don't have a shot with any of you?
  [everybody shudders and walks away]
• Disproportionate Retribution: Mostly in Season 2. He believes no retribution is too harsh for those who he feels have wronged him even a little. It gets to the point where Jeff beats him up for his cruelty.
  • In "Asian Population Studies", he theorizes that Shirley may be pregnant with Chang's baby (which she knew nothing about) just because she voted against him on what new member to invite into the study group.
  • In "Intro to Political Science", he joins the race for student body president just to repeatedly publicly humiliate Vicki for not lending him her pencil.
  • In "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking", he psychologically torments every other member of the study group by faking his own death and giving them "gifts" that turn each of them half-crazed. His reason for doing this is, in his own words, that they had started to exclude him more often and weren't taking him seriously.
  • An especially dark and borderline-sociopathic example in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" is him trying to take the last remaining joy away from the already severely depressed Neil, who was heavily implied to be planning his suicide after getting bullied due to his weight. Pierce, who was fully informed of this fact by the others, also proceeded to, of course, mercilessly bully him due to his weight. Why? Because Neil was invited to a game of Dungeons and Dragons (which was specifically done in an attempt to save his life), and Pierce, for reasons that should be obvious, was left out.
• The Ditz: A particularly nasty example. Pierce is crass, insensitive, clueless about many things, and willfully ignorant as to the effect he has on everyone else.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Pierce hates the thought of anyone pitying him for any reason. Unfortunately, he's also so desperate for attention that rather than accept people's pity, he'll instead lash out in more negative ways to the point that pity ends up being the last thing anyone feels for him, even if he genuinely warrants it.
• Draft Dodging: Fled to Canada to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War.
• Driven by Envy: On many occasions, when he feels left out of the group's activities. This applies even if he considers said activities stupid.
• Dumbass Has a Point: He shows piercing and penetrating insight every once in a while. Crosses over with Even Evil Has Standards when he tells off Jeff for being a crap friend to Britta by constantly using her name as a verb for a failure to the point where it gets old and mean rather than funny. He also predicted the staying popularity of video games.
• Evil Is Hammy: In "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", which goes hand-in-hand with his increased jerkassery.
• Evil Is Petty: When pretending to overdose on pills, he plays mind games.
  • He's especially petty during, "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", when he cruelly taunts Neil.
• Embarrassing First Name: His full first name is revealed to be "Piercinald"
• Embarrassing Middle Name: His middle name is Anastasia
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: It's revealed that he often talks to his mother about how he feels Jeff bullies him, and tells her he has a Girlfriend in Canada.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He's horrified when Leonard's gang, the Hipsters, abandon a genuinely senile old man to take the fall for their antics in "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples".
  • Despite his blatant dislike and jealousy of Abed for most of the series, Pierce is noticeably disgusted with Professor Duncan's incessant bullying of him during his mental breakdown to the point of entering a catatonic state in Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas.
  • Played for Hypocritical Humour when even he thinks Jeff accidentally implying that he thinks "all black people are in prison", is going too far.
  • In Digital Estate Planning, Pierce ultimately chooses to reject his father's inheritance to allow his half-brother Gilbert Lawson to have it, as he recognizes that the amount of racist abuse he was subject to at Cornelius's hands and using a video game to torture him for existing is wrong. Pierce even admits that Cornelius refusing to acknowledge Gilbert as his son, even within the game, is worse than anything their father ever did to him.
• Flanderization: In Season 4, into a massive racist. Combined with Out of Focus as shown below and you get a character who does little more than spout racist one-liners before shuffling out of focus again, which was reportedly one of the main reasons Chevy Chase was increasingly frustrated with and dismissive of the show.
• Forced Meme: Tries to force "streets ahead" to become hip in "Contemporary American Poultry".
• For the Evulz: Buying Abed and Troy's handshake just so he can ruin it is a good example.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Sanguine.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Jeff thinks so:
  Annie: He's a jerk because we exclude him.
  Jeff: We exclude him because he's a jerk. And the last time I checked, you were the last one feeling sorry about it.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: His necessity is revealed when, in his absence, the study group begins to fight amongst each other for incredibly petty reasons just because they no longer have Pierce to kick around.
• Hate Sink: Invoked in a few episodes, where it's noted that the other members of the study group tend to use Pierce as an outlet for their negative emotions. When he briefly leaves the group in "Communication Studies", the others end up squabbling with each other because they're no longer united by hatred of him. And in "Biology 101", he falsely admits to getting Jeff kicked out of Professor Kane's class to give Jeff a plausible excuse for his erratic behavior (knowing that it's easier for the group to hate him than Jeff).
• Hidden Depths: In the Season 2 finale:
  Pierce: You know I've been coming to this school for twelve years? I—I've never been friends with anyone here for more than a semester. Probably for the same reason I've been married seven times. I guess I assume eventually I'll get rejected, so I, you know, test people, push them until they prove me right. It's a sickness, I admit it. But, this place has always accepted me, sickness and all. This place accepted all of you. Sickness and all. It's worth thinking about.
  • He can play piano, even if he can't compose any original material.
  • He is also seen skipping in one episode.
  • He's actually a fairly savvy businessman. He helped Shirley get over her fear of public speaking by putting her through exercises for sales pitches, and he saw the monetary value in publishing computer games decades ago despite being told they were just a passing fad
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Deconstructed. What Pierce longs most for is affection and popularity, and as a result, he gets extremely jealous of other people's friendships, especially Abed and Troy's, since he really wants something similar but finds it hard to establish that kind of connection to another person. Ironically, it is his jealousy that leads him to act out in petty and vicious ways, and this in turn pushes people further away from him.
• Innocent Bigot: Regularly says things the other characters find offensive. Generational differences play a role.
• It Will Never Catch On: As an example of his business insight, he accurately predicted how big video games would be and pitched the idea to his father. Unfortunately, Cornelius didn't listen.
• Jerkass: Especially crass in Season 2 when he comes dangerously close (as noted by Abed) to becoming a real-life supervillain.
• Jerkass Has a Point: For all his abrasiveness and stupidity, he's right about things more often than you'd expect or that the study group might be comfortable with, particularly when it comes to the subject of how alike to him they really are deep down.
  • In "Asian Population Studies", after Troy argues that they shouldn't tell Shirley that she slept with Chang as her not being able to remember it is a gift, Pierce points out that not telling Shirley that Chang might be the father of her unborn baby is far worse. It's taken Up to Eleven when Pierce ultimately does tell Shirley out of spite, as he's not exactly wrong for telling her, but rather how he tells her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: A very minor example; there are occasional glimpses of someone more likable, decent and sympathetic within Pierce, but they're buried almost impenetrably deep within a crust and outer core of insufferable Jerkass. In general, if anyone's going to reveal Pierce's nicer side, it's Annie. Season 5 has Pierce's hologram and will put him firmly in this category.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Zigzagged and heavily downplayed. While the group will call him out for being a Jerkass or ensure that he faces karma, he's allowed to stay when they realize that need a Butt-Monkey to mock. In Season 5, it's revealed his antics got him banned from Greendale and then he suffered an Undignified Death.
• Kavorka Man: He's been divorced seven times. This means seven different women agreed to marry him in the first place. He also helps his friends pass Spanish by sleeping with the teacher.
• Kick the Dog: He definitely crosses the line with his treatment of the depressed, suicidal Neil (who has never done anything wrong to him except sit in his chair) in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons".
• The Klutz: He manages to fall out of Jeff's chair just by sitting in it, as well as getting the most laughs at Abed's bad movie night by tripping and knocking over Chang's popcorn.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He always acts as though he knows more than everybody else, when this is anything but the case. Troy implicitly states that he tries to look like he's not stupid, to which Pierce replies by bluntly calling himself a genius.
• Laborious Laziness: Pierce would rather expend his effort to punish people for excluding him rather than actually being nice. The group calls him out for this, especially in Season 2. As shown during the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", if he put in the same effort to be a decent human being that he does into using the specific dungeon against the group and Neil, they wouldn't have felt the need to exclude him in the first place.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A particularly dark variant: as the series progresses it becomes difficult to separate Pierce's behavior from Chevy's behind-the-scenes antics, and it's entirely possible Pierce's increased ostracization may be "inspired" by Chase driving everyone else crazy. Did Pierce become more awful and irritate Chevy, or did Chevy's behavior provoke Pierce's characterization? Both? Neither?
• The Load: Whenever the group does a group activity. Subverted in "Basic Human Anatomy", when he does the group's History project by himself after they all left him behind to go have their episode plots.
  • Also subverted in "A Few Paintballs More" when Pierce manages to win the paintball game by faking a heart attack. Twice.
• Lonely Rich Kid: His backstory in a nutshell. And the only real thing that has changed since then is his age.
• Manipulative Bastard: Best shown in "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking", where he makes the rest of the group paranoid for ostracizing him.
• Manchild: Pierce has a great list of immaturities and insecurities bordering on Psychopathic Man Child.
• The Millstone: Especially in Season 2. He discovers Jeff and Troy's "secret trampoline" and manages to expose it in a matter of minutes, getting it removed from campus, and breaking both his legs in the process. His ego leads him to go off-script during an anti-drug PSA, getting a room full of middle-schoolers excited for drugs (until Chang fixes it simply by taking his place). The rest of the group is occasionally Genre Savvy about this, not inviting him to a Dungeons & Dragons game / suicide intervention due to his insensitive manner (and they are proven right when he crashes the game and nearly short-circuits the whole thing). During one of the paintball episodes, Jeff exploits this in order to use Pierce as a decoy:
  Jeff: Hey Pierce, don't come over here, okay?
  Pierce: Screw you! I'm comin' over there! [gets shot]
• Mirror Character: Despite their obvious disdain for him, Pierce arguably has this going on with all the other members of the study group even if they don't want to acknowledge it:
  • It's most prominent with Jeff, as it's often suggested that Pierce is essentially what an older version of Jeff will look like if Jeff doesn't improve his ways;
  • Like Britta, Pierce often takes over-the-top offense at quasi-imagined slights and has some questionable political views (and understanding);
  • He shares Abed's social ineptness and tendency to say whatever's on his mind regardless of who it might offend;
  • He's intensely over-competitive and determined to win whatever the cost (even if it risks ruining his relationships with the people around him), like Annie. They also share a history of substance abuse;
  • Shirley is often offended by his ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry, but she can often be just as ignorant, intolerant, and even bigoted;
  • Like Troy, he's immature, a bit egotistical, and not very intelligent.
• Misplaced Retribution: He takes out his frustrations of being excluded on Neil in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", even when Jeff and Abed tell him this is a suicide intervention without Neil's knowledge.
• Mistaken for Racist: Despite his obvious lack of sensitivity, there are times when he genuinely doesn't intend to be offensive.
• Never My Fault: Pierce lives and breathes this trope. His comments and actions aren't offensive, it's everyone else who needs to learn to take a joke. His over-the-top revenge schemes are no less than what others deserve for not giving him the enormous amounts of respect that are clearly his due. He usually gets away with it, too.
• Not Helping Your Case: When he tries to dramatically say the group excluded him in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons," they explain they're doing a fantasy RPG. He then calls it gay and stupid before berating them further.
• The Obi-Wannabe: Fortunately, it's pretty obvious to the rest of the study group from the beginning. His cameo in the Season 5 opener plays with this, when Jeff encounters what initially appears to be Pierce's spirit telling him, "Looks as if you've lost your way"... but it just turns out to be a hologram directing students to the on-campus "Pierce Hawthorne Museum of Gender Sensitivity and Sexual Potency". Even then, his words about Greendale give Jeff his Heel Realization. The Season 6 opener has Abed invoke Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, since nobody else has ever seen the hologram or the museum.
• Odd Friendship: Pierce and... anyone, really.
• Out of Focus: Receives less and less focus as time goes on.
• Pet the Dog: As befitting him being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Pierce is in fact capable of true acts of kindness every once in a while. Standout examples include:
  • "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking": The tiara he gives Annie was not a mind game, but in fact a genuine gift on his part because she's his favorite of the group.
  • "Digital Estate Planning": He thanks the group for helping him beat his father at his own game and later encourages Gilbert to do the same. Pierce then happily embraces Gilbert as the brother he's always wanted.
  • "Herstory of Dance": He arranges for Sophie B. Hawkins to make an appearance at Britta's dance, as he was sick of how Jeff was treating her and admired how she didn't give up, even in the face of absolute failure.
  • "Cooperative Polygraphy": He leaves genuine gifts and some very kind words for Britta, Shirley, Annie, and Troy, showing that he did in fact care for and respect them. Double Subverted with Jeff, who received a gift but rather than a compliment only got one last gay accusation, though it can also be interpreted as Pierce instead viewing their relationship as Vitriolic Best Buds. Subverted with Abed, who is only insulted and given nothing but obligatory sperm.
• Phrase Catcher: "Uh oh." Said by a member of the study group whenever Pierce appears to be demonstrating a dangerous level of senility.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: In so much as Pierce can be considered a hero, anyway. He's racist, sexist, and homophobic, but Innocently Insensitive for the most part.
• Punny Name: He easily gets on everyone's nerves, piercing through their patience/tolerance.
• Put on a Bus: Graduates with Jeff at the end of Season 4. Season 5 reveals that he's banned from Greendale. He dies off-screen that same season.
• Punny Name: He's prickly.
• Racist Grandpa: Naturally. Although unlike his father, who is actively malicious in his racism, Pierce just doesn't know better.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!
• Senior Sleep-Cycle: In "Competitive Ecology".
• Serial Spouse: He's been divorced seven times.
• Sitcom Character Archetypes: Flip-flops back and forth between The Bully and The Sage. As an old man, he holds some politically incorrect views, and often throws fits or is transparently manipulative in order to get his own way. For example, in one episode he pretends to be dying and divides up the study group with final bequeathals to get back at them for ignoring him in previous episodes. On the flip side, he likes to view himself as a mentor to the study group, and often has quiet moments where he dispenses wisdom, particularly to Annie and Jeff.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: In the study room, Pierce and Jeff tend to butt heads the most, deconstructed in Season 2.
• Token Evil Teammate: Easily the biggest Jerkass of the seven. Pierce is spiteful, petty, immature, and insensitive, and has occasionally played the role of a villain within the group.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In Season 2, he starts engaging in self-alienating behavior while simultaneously castigating the others for alienating him; this culminates in the events of "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking," "A Fistful of Paintballs," and "For a Few Paintballs More."
• Took a Level in Kindness: He loses much of his malicious edge in Season 3 upon some self-reflection, and returns back to the bumbling senior he used to be in Season 1. While he still has his moments of jerkassery, they're more out of insensitivity or a need to be acknowledged rather than nastiness. Conversely, he's also a lot nicer to the other members of the Study Group, most notably in his interactions with Shirley over their mutual desire to open a sandwich shop.
• Totally Radical: His attempt to coin the phrase "streets ahead".
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Can come across as this. Pierce's inappropriateness, overzealous creativity, and pathological need to be accepted at all costs are all rooted in frustrations getting attention from his father and his fear that his age is now isolating himself from the rest of the study group.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Especially in Seasons 2 and 4.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Revealed as one in "Celebrity Pharmacology."
• Yuri Fan:
  • He thinks Girl on Girl Is Hot. And he did have that oddly supportive letter for Britta after she "came out" for "dating a lesbian".
  • Played with, as despite his tendency toward perversion, in "Advanced Gay", he says that he hates lesbians.

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