Female Character of the Week: Britta Perry

All the female characters I’ve honored so far have endeared themselves to me the first moment I met them.  The one I’m honoring today was an acquired taste, and deserves some kind of Most Improved Award.  Since I’m still high on the joy of having Community on my screen every week, I’m selecting Britta Perry as my Female Character of the Week.

Name: Britta Perry

Why I Didn’t Like Her: I didn’t warm up to Community right away, despite a crop of highly amusing supporting characters, because I couldn’t stand the two leads and found the female lead particularly annoying.  The writers introduced us to Jeff Winger, a smug, recently disbarred lawyer who faked his undergraduate credentials to get his law degree.  They soon after introduced us to Britta, a Hot Blonde, and Jeff’s Love Interest.  She was a fellow student in his Spanish class at Greendale Community College.  Jeff, enchanted by her Elisabeth Shue good looks, pretended to be a Spanish tutor and put together a study group for the sole purpose of hitting on her.  Immediately, the premise was flawed: as an audience, we were supposed to believe that someone as lazy as Jeff would set up such an elaborate scheme just to hit on this one woman, when he seemed much more the type to hit on her once, shrug his shoulders when it didn’t work, and look for someone else to bang.  But they asked us to buy into Jeff and Britta’s Unresolved Sexual Tension.  I love a bantering, will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic as much as the next television viewer, but both characters were so insufferably smug that I couldn’t enjoy the UST at all.

Soon, the show started pairing Jeff with the other characters, and he became much more enjoyable to watch.  Unfortunately, Britta remained mostly in Jeff’s orbit, and her character continued to suffer.  He smugly hit on her, she smugly rebuffed his advances, and she continued to grate.  Britta was the Cool Alternative Chick who, amazingly, was also the most sensitive and caring of the group – she reached out to Abed when everyone else thought he was weird and expressed sympathy for Pierce when everyone else thought he was just that weird old guy.  From the very beginning, Community struck me as a show that would lovingly mock all of its characters…but Britta still had the aura of Jeff’s Hot Cool Alternative Love Interest following her like a Mary Sueish stench that made me hate her.

Why I Love Her Now: The first time I liked Britta was in the first Halloween episode, when she dressed in a cute squirrel costume and chided Jeff when he actually deserved it and not because he had the audacity to ask her out.  I also liked her in the Christmas episode, for making snarky comments about the homoeroticism in guys wanting to fight each other.  I don’t know if this was the writers’ plan all along (like Dan Harmon claims), or if they realized their mistake early on and made a gradual correction, but slowly and surely, Britta grew to be as ridiculous as everyone else on the show.  Even better, they didn’t have to give her a complete personality transplant to make it work.  Britta had the same flaws in late season one as she did at the beginning of the show, but the qualities that the audience couldn’t stand about her soon became the qualities that the characters couldn’t stand about her, either. 

No longer was Britta the Cool Sensitive Alternative Chick, but the girl who thought she was cool and sensitive and alternative, when in fact, she was a huge buzzkill raining on everyone’s parade.  She’s the girl who smugly announces that she is a vegetarian as though she expects to be rewarded for this.  She pretends to be indifferent to such shallow matters as appearance and fashion when (as Annie points out), she has an extensive leather jacket collection and her hair always looks stylishly messy rather than messy-messy.  She still listens to a Discman and claims that it’s “retro,” even though the truth is, she’s just too cheap to get an iPod.  She claims to know all about the world, having been so well-traveled, yet can’t even pronounce the word “bagel” correctly and almost cries when the group makes fun of her for it:

What kills me most about this sequence is her indignant, smug insistence that of course she knows what a “bag-el” is because she lived in New York. I also love her perfect impersonation of Annie’s gasp.

Britta also has one of my all-time favorite lines from the show, from when she passionately stands up to Professor Slater and claims to own Jeff’s heart: “Jeff needs a girl who doesn’t just not wear underwear because Oprah told her it would spice things up.  He needs a girl who doesn’t wear underwear because she hasn’t done laundry in three weeks!”  I’m on the record for hating Jeff/Britta as a romantic pairing and for being a hopelessly romantic Jeff/Annie shipper, but that damn, that line still makes me laugh, and Gillian Jacobs’ self-satisfied delivery is perfect.

As a feminist, I want to see good female role models in fiction.  But as a feminist who loves comedy, I want my female characters to have the license to be just as ridiculous and silly as the male characters.  There was a time when I wanted the show to get rid of Britta.  Now?  I can’t imagine the show without her.  It took me awhile to warm up to her, but I officially love Britta Perry because she deludes herself into thinking she’s hip and then has to face that she is, in fact, chronically uncool.