Yvette Nicole Brown Calls Out Online Hater Who Doesn’t Want Shirley to Be in the ‘Community’ Movie

On Community, insulting Shirley Bennett was like playing a game of Russian Roulette in which the options were either a Christ-like turning of the other cheek accompanied by a passive-aggressive prayer or a public tongue lashing. In real life, coming after Yvette Nicole Brown on her own Instagram page is essentially the same thing — except all the chambers are loaded with an ass-kicking.

The long-awaited Community movie was supposed to start filming this summer, but production has been postponed as Hollywood’s many unions wrestle with their executives over issues of fair pay. Fans following the prophecy of “Six Seasons and a Movie” may know that the film adaptation’s biggest advocate is also one of its biggest question marks — though Brown has been campaigning for a Community movie since the show went off the air for the final time, her name has not yet landed on the official cast list for the feature-length Peacock project.

Unlike most Community fans, one online hater has been rooting for Brown’s absence in the upcoming movie, a fact that no single person ever needed to know — especially Brown. So over the weekend, Brown exposed them for who they are.

“I try to be better but the asshats just keep pulling me back,” Brown captioned a DM from Dimitris Ke, a Community “fan” who felt the need to tell her that he never liked her character and hopes she won’t be in the movie. “I don’t care if Dim-Dim or anyone else likes Shirley or any other character I play. Characters don’t exist. This mess is make believe. Are they serious?!”

Brown put the pettiness between her and Ke in context, saying, “We’ve got bigger problems in this world than what I did as a character on a TV show 14 years ago. … What baffles me is someone choosing to seek out a stranger to be idiotically nasty — thinking the stranger gives a (poop emoji). I’m a freaking adult. Good & grown AND a Black woman in AmeriKKKa. What do they they (sic) think I’m gonna do? Cry… over a tv show?!”

Us regular folk who don’t slide into strangers’ DMs just to spread negativity will never understand the mentality of those who do, but if I can give Ke one piece of advice, it’s this — if he actually does want to make a Community cast member cry over a TV show as Brown suggested, his best bet would be to tell Danny Pudi that Cougartown is still canceled.