List of Community characters
Community is an American television sitcom created by Dan Harmon that ran for 110 episodes. The show, set at the fictional Greendale Community College, depicts the on-campus exploits of a close-knit study group. In the pilot, the main cast members are Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, and Chevy Chase. Ken Jeong joined the main cast starting with the second episode, and Jim Rash was promoted to the main cast at the start of the third season. John Oliver, Jonathan Banks, Paget Brewster, and Keith David also played major roles throughout their stints while not actually being credited among the main cast. The series also features recurring characters, mainly fellow students or teachers at Greendale.
Overview
Main
Recurring
Main characters
The show revolves around the on-and-off campus exploits of seven students connected through their study group at Greendale Community College.Jeff Winger
Jeffrey Tobias "Jeff" Winger, born c. 1974, is a sardonic, charismatic, and quick-witted ex-lawyer attending Greendale Community College. He was born in Denver, Colorado, to parents William and Doreen Winger. His father divorced his mother when Jeff was very young and later had another child named Willy Jr., Jeff's half-brother. At the age of 10, he was bullied and humiliated in front of his friends at a YMCA over a game of foosball, eventually wetting his pants. Unbeknownst to either of them at the time, the girl who beat him was his study-group peer Shirley, who was then 12 and a bully. He tells her that he had to change schools, as well as his hair, his clothes, even his personality because of the incident. In 1997, around age 19, Jeff submitted an audition tape for MTV's The Real World: Seattle, which would later come back to haunt him during an election for Greendale's student-body president. In the season 5 episode "Geothermal Escapism", as study-group member Troy is about to leave Greendale, Jeff discreetly reveals to him that he has "never set one foot outside Colorado".Because of his background experience as a lawyer and his confidence, many people, including Dean Pelton and Señor Chang, seek help from Jeff. Jeff's adventures include stints as a member of the debate team and substitute glee club, and editor of the school newspaper, as well as efforts to improve Chang's professional and love lives. Due to his competitive nature and air of superiority, Jeff has a problematic relationship with his accounting, billiards, and pottery professors, and he ends up doing poorly in their classes.
Britta Perry
Britta Perry is a student at Greendale and a member of the central study group. Politically conscious and driven by a strong moral conscience, Britta's sensibilities often put her at odds with the rest of the group as well as other students at Greendale, who see her as a "buzzkill." Having dropped out of high school under the impression that it would impress Radiohead, she attends Greendale to get her G.E.D and eventually opts to study Psychology in order to become a therapist.Britta joins the study group in order to improve her Spanish grade, though she quickly realizes that Jeff has only created the group in order to sleep with her. Though she initially rebuffs his advances, the two have sex toward the end of the school year. Britta, in an attempt to compete with Jeff's affections for Professor Michelle Slater, publicly confesses her love for Jeff. Though she is humiliated by this, she finds that she has attracted the attention and respect of many women on campus who hail her for her bravery. Jeff and Britta continue sleeping together covertly during their second year, up until Abed reveals their relations to the group. In season 3, Britta enters a relationship with Troy, though Troy initiates their breakup on their first anniversary and Britta is left saddened but also stays friends with Troy afterwards.
While vocally passionate about many causes, Britta fails to take action related to her social interests, and her political efforts run a gamut from sincere but ineffectual to counterproductive and embarrassing. Jeff describes her as "pro-anti" due to her eagerness to oppose issues, such as marriage and visiting the bathroom with other women. Her hypocrisy and tendency to invoke politics regardless of relevance, such as advocating for fictional gnomes' rights in Dungeons & Dragons, frequently frustrates both friends and strangers, to the point that others regularly refer to her as "the worst." The S2 episode "Critical Film Studies" heaped more humiliation on Britta when the owner of the crummy diner where she was an unsuccessful waitress made sure to let Annie and Shirley know that customers made a point of tipping Britta next to nothing, and he later makes a deal with Jeff to take less money after the group accidentally trashed the diner as long as Britta gets fired.
Britta graduates from Greendale in season 4 and starts bartending, but she re-enrolls in classes in season 5 once Jeff becomes a professor. She joins the Save Greendale Committee and helps prevent the school from being sold to Subway.
Despite being seen as obnoxious by those around her, Britta regularly proves herself to be a caring friend. She is the first to show concern for Abed when he begins seeing the world in claymation, consoles Abed and attempts to help him when he is upset over Troy's brief stint in the A/C Repair school, and helps Buzz Hickey reconnect with his son over Dungeons & Dragons.
Abed Nadir
Abed Gubi Nadir is a young, emotionally reserved, Palestinian-Polish-American pop-culture enthusiast who aspires to become a director and is currently taking film directing classes at Greendale. Paste ranked him first in their list of the 20 Best Characters of 2011, describing him as "the show's emotional center" and saying "his pop-culture obsessions and antics with his buddy Troy have made for some of the show's finest moments."Abed Nadir is an alumnus of Greendale Community College. Abed had a troublesome life growing up due to a limited extent to his parents. There was social disunity between them as Abed's dad is a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip and his mom is Polish American. Abed is heavily implied to be on the autism spectrum, which makes it hard for him to understand and relate to people or display empathy in a normal way.
Shirley Bennett
Shirley Anne Bennett, née Edwards, is a recently divorced mother who attends Greendale Community College to pursue launching her own baked goods business. She carries herself in a friendly and motherly manner, but suffers from thinly veiled rage issues and is implied to have an alcoholic past.A devout Christian, Shirley's intolerance for her friends' religions often puts her at odds with the rest of the study group. She attempts to baptize Annie at a pool party and suggests doing the same to Abed while he is in a catatonic state. Despite this, she is typically able to set aside religious differences in the interest of maintaining her friendships with the group.
In "Epidemiology", Shirley becomes frustrated with the group for mistaking her Glinda the Good Witch costume as Miss Piggy and has sex with Ben Chang, who is similarly frustrated that his Peggy Fleming costume is mistaken as Kristi Yamaguchi or Michelle Kwan. Soon after, she reconnects with her ex-husband, Andre, and discovers she is pregnant. A message left on Troy's voicemail leads the group to speculate that Chang, not Andre, is the biological father, a possibility that Shirley finds repellant and is determined to avoid acknowledging. The baby is born in "Applied Anthropology and Culinary Arts" during what was supposed to be their Anthropology final exam, and Shirley is relieved to find that it is her husband's baby. She decides to name the baby Ben after Chang, making her son Ben Bennett.
In "Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts", Andre asks Shirley to remarry him. They marry after resolving a small conflict concerning whether Shirley will leave school and become a stay-at-home mother. She stays in school and opens a sandwich shop with Pierce, naming it "Shirley's Sandwich Shop."
In season 5, it is revealed that Andre has once again left Shirley and taken the kids with him due to her devoting too much time and money to her sandwich business. She returns to Greendale to continue pursuing her entrepreneurial dreams, and joins the Save Greendale Committee. In the season six premiere, Shirley leaves for Atlanta in order to care for her ailing father. She eventually becomes the personal chef of a suicidal former detective attempting to solve the mystery behind his wife's death and his paralysis. When the group discusses her absence, Abed claims she was "spun off", and the closing credits feature a mock television advertisement for an NBC police procedural about Shirley and the detective titled The Butcher and the Baker.
Annie Edison
Annie Edison is a diligent, straitlaced, Type-A, Jewish student who is in her fifth year at Greendale Community College after graduating and then reapplying to major in her dream, forensic science. During high school, Annie was a timid, nerdy student who desperately wanted to succeed, subsequently developing an addiction to Adderall. She was an acquaintance of Troy Barnes, a popular athlete, and harbored a crush on him. They both attended a party where high school honors were being awarded. When Troy, instead of Annie, received the award for "Most Likely to Succeed", and when he failed to recognize Annie when she criticized him, she suffered a nervous breakdown that culminated in her jumping through a plate-glass window yelling, "Everyone's a robot!" Her injuries necessitated six separate reconstructive surgeries. Against the wishes of her mother, she chose to confront the addiction and go to rehab. This led to an estrangement from her family, including any financial support, and she currently survives on her savings from her childhood. In season 2, the group learns she is living in a horrible neighborhood, and Troy and Abed invite her to move into their new place in season 3.While attending rehab, she had an outing to a frozen yogurt restaurant, during which she saw an advertisement for Greendale and decided to participate in the community college. Between her graduation from rehab and her enrollment in Greendale, she shed her geek appearance and began to straighten her hair and dress more fashionably.
Though the youngest of the group, Annie is also by far the most studious and serious. She is, for example, the only student of Greendale to have ever made use of the extra credit program that the college offers by hosting a Dia de los Muertos party. During an episode where she is forced to leave the group due to her sabotaging their Spanish finals, the group learns that she is the only person who knows how to study. She also takes audio notes of every class and transcribes them, prompting Pierce to exclaim and misuse the term "spoiler alert". She is very intensely focused on grades, school activities, and group cohesion. A noticeably cheerful girl, she is enthusiastic about helping out the school, writing for the school paper and participating on the debate team, and organizing school events. Annie's youthful innocence often, but not always, means that she is less involved with the group's less morally acceptable practices, though she genuinely enjoys spending time with them. She attempts to motivate and manipulate the other study group members with guilt, using her "Disney face". She takes the cohesion of the study group more seriously than the other members and, in trying to get the group to retake Spanish 102 together, gets Señor Chang fired for his fake degree in "English as a Second Language".
Annie has been shown to occasionally choose her interests over keeping the group intact, first by dating Britta's estranged ex-boyfriend Vaughn and choosing to leave Greendale and the group to follow Vaughn to another college, and later by deciding to exclude Jeff from the group and her friendship during his season 3 premiere nervous breakdown when he attacked the table with an ax after accidentally inhaling monkey-gas. On one occasion, her somewhat-illicit cradle sexuality is used to lure Jeff into Glee Club. Nonetheless, these cases rarely result in long-lasting issues. Annie used to pine after Troy, on whom she had a crush since his high school football quarterback days, but that stops when she begins dating Vaughn. At the end of the first season, it appears as if Annie has developed a romantic dynamic with Jeff, whom she kissed both to win a debate competition and at the end of the season. While she is still interested in Jeff at the beginning of season 2, he is more standoffish, and after the study group learns he'd had sex with Britta during the paintball episode, Annie says she thinks of Jeff as "gross". Later in the episode "Asian Population Studies" Annie develops a crush on Dr. Rich Stephenson, a fellow Greendale student that Jeff had clashed with. Jeff seems jealous but refuses to admit it. However, Rich declines Annie's advances due to their age difference. There have been indications that Annie may still harbor feelings for Jeff, and it has been suggested that he may feel similarly. However, it is revealed in "Virtual Systems Analysis" that Annie is coming to terms with how exactly she feels about Jeff when Abed manipulates her because of her apparent feelings for him. Annie learns from the experience that the way she responds to her feelings for Jeff is shallow and immaterial and that any kind of love or feelings like this is not fair to herself or the other person. She also gains a better understanding of Abed as well.
In season 5, Annie has become a salesperson for a pharmaceutical company and returns to Greendale to accomplish better things with her life. She becomes the leader of the Save Greendale Committee. At the end of season 6, she gets an internship at the FBI.
In the series finale "Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television", Annie said goodbye to Jeff before leaving catch her Washington, D.C. flight.