The brilliance of Britta Perry, Communitys prophetic activist killjoy
“Community,” Dan Harmon’s eccentric, experimental sitcom about students at a community college, made a daring jump this year from NBC to Yahoo’s fledgling television operation. But the show’s sixth season kicked off in conventional form, with Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) explaining where the characters are now in the form of a school-wide announcement over Greendale’s intercom system. Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is teaching, while Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi) is continuing his journeys across the fourth wall. Most fitting is the place we find Britta Perry, Greendale’s activist resident scold, played with great aplomb by Gillian Jacobs, who turns out to be “raising awareness of homelessness, not that she has a choice,” since she’s ended up living in a tent on the Greendale campus.
It’s the perfect destination for a character who, over six seasons, has been both defined and confined by the politics she injects in to every conversation. And while “Community” is perhaps most famous for Abed, a character whose love of pop culture makes him a stand-in for social-media empowered superfans, Britta is an equally prescient creation. “Community” premiered in 2009. In the years since, debates about everything from the use of Twitter as a tool to enforce ideals of political purity, to the rise of cultural criticism based in ideological litmus tests, to increasingly polarized atmospheres on college campuses driven by the fight against sexual assault, have made Britta’s character look not just funny, but like a prophetic commentary on a certain kind of activist more concerned about social positioning than actual results.
Looking back on the second episode of “Community,” that’s exactly what Britta is. The pilot had introduced her primarily as the reluctant and self-aware object of disbarred lawyer Jeff’s disinterest. But in “Spanish 101,” the show found a more specific comedic lane for her to play in. Annie (Alison Brie) and Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), eager to have as many stereotypical college experiences as possible, ask Britta to teach them about government-sponsored violence against journalists in Guatemala. “You’re like Jodie Foster or Susan Sarandon! You’d rather keep it real than be likable!” Annie tells Britta brightly, and Britta, desperate to be liked, seizes the opportunity to be an admirable authority figure.
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A Very Special Episode might have left her there, leading Annie and Shirley to make a minor contribution to the fight against a dictatorship. But “Community” is a show where a Very Special Episode means a half-hour of television dedicated to a single game of Dungeons and Dragons intended as suicide prevention. And Britta’s fledgling partnership with Annie and Shirley fell apart over Britta’s conviction that her classmates were dilettantes. Their resulting fight reads like a transcript from the future of Twitter.
“This is not how you do this!” Britta told the other women. “This is tacky and lame . . . What I meant to say is that this cause is really personal to me.” “Are you saying that we’re not allowed to protest?” Annie asked, sensing Britta’s attempts to outflank them. “Britta, you sound like Guatemala.” And it was Shirley who provided one of the best diagnoses Britta would ever receive (although a later description of her as “needlessly defiant” is also right on the mark): “Sounds like somebody has a case of Likes To Use French Politics To Make Themselves Feel Special But Doesn’t Actually Ever Want To Do Anything Itis.”
How true it is. Britta turns out to be the kind of person who turns a girls’ trip to the bathroom into an opportunity to connect the makeup industry to abusive policing practices, even though she turns out never to have cast a ballot in her life. She derails Dungeons and Dragons into a meditation on the oppression of goblins. This season, she tries to use politics to cover up her disastrous tenure as the proprietress of Shirley’s sandwich shop. “Think of it as a crushing blow to a gender stereotype,” Britta says, presenting a lump of charcoal that was once a panini to one customer, and tries to shame another out of demanding a refund because “It might not seem like it, but you’re killing a small, black-owned business.”
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Once her friends figure out Britta’s schtick, she’s a killjoy who’s only lethal to her own happiness. Britta’s so dedicated to her self-righteousness that she can’t make compromises, like one that might let her pursue her freakish talent for wedding planning while subverting the wedding industrial complex from within. And she doesn’t have the sense of humor that might let her adopt the satiric misandry that’s become a jaunty feminist response to charges of man-hating humorlessness. Once Britta has dedicated herself to a position, no matter how stupid or self-destructive, she sticks to it, even when that means going into debt and descending in to homelessness to avoid accepting help from her fundamentally decent parents.
Britta’s character is no reflection on the innumerable activists who do more work than posturing, and who have goals loftier than the elevation of their own reputations. But she is a useful caution about the dangers of substituting positions for feelings and opinions and mistaking what’s important to you for what’s important, period. Ending up homeless because you’re holding on to your teenage resentments doesn’t mean you know anything important about poverty. Giving up work you might enjoy and be good at defeats no interests other than your own. And you won’t be able to change the world if you’re too perpetually affronted to actually live in it.
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