4 Times on ‘Community’ When Pierce Was An Even Bigger A-Hole Than Chevy Chase
Due to his canonical demise, Pierce Hawthorne will not be able to add to his rap sheet of reprehensible behavior in the upcoming Community movie. However, there’s still time for Chevy Chase to add to his own list of a-hole offenses.
Chase’s extensive history of d-baggery is the stuff of comedy legend — from terrorizing the women of Saturday Night Live to dropping N-bombs on the set of the aforementioned Dan Harmon sitcom, just about everyone who has worked with the cranky comedy icon has a horror story about a time when he was even worse than Britta. Perhaps that’s why he was able to play Pierce so well — he had decades of experience being the biggest butthole in the room.
Though Chase’s transgressions are comparably worse than those of his Community character for the simple fact that they happened in real life and not on a fictional TV show, Pierce had numerous villainous moments in his near-four season run at Greendale Community College that make Chase’s troubles look positively mundane. Here are four such horrible instances…
The Time He Told Everyone That Señor Chang Might Be Shirley’s Baby Daddy
There are countless instances of Pierce being awful to Shirley that could land on the list, but over the course of their entire fraught relationship, few were as needlessly petty as the one in “Asian Population Studies” when he spilled the beans about her near-forgotten affair with Señor Chang just because his side lost in a vote over adding a new member to the study group.
Fresh off of a reconnection with her estranged husband Andre, Shirley reveals that she is eight weeks pregnant, which lines up with the Halloween incident when she slept with Chang shortly before everyone’s memories are wiped by the U.S. military — but not before Chang leaves Troy a voicemail bragging about the banging. Pierce casually exposing the affair threatens to derail her rekindled romance and casts a pall over the rest of the season as Chang eagerly anticipates his love child's birth — though, in the end, the kid didn’t have a tail, and Andre’s genes prevailed.
The Time He Taught A School Full of Kids That Drugs Are Rad As Hell
To be fair to Pierce, this one isn’t all that much worse than what D.A.R.E. did in real life. In the Season Two episode “Celebrity Pharmacology,” Pierce reacts to being cast as the antagonist in an anti-drug play for a middle school by plotting to have his part as an anthropomorphic pot leaf punched up to be a show-stealer.
It wasn’t just the fact that Pierce conspired to make a bunch of middle schoolers love drugs that makes this awful, it’s how he did it. Early in the episode Pierce gives the struggling Annie rent money promising no strings attached, only to get his punchlines in the script at the expense of hers.
The Time He Faked A Terminal Illness Just to Torture the Entire Group (Besides Annie)
With a massive moist towelette fortune and nothing but free time, Pierce’s nefarious plotting reached preposterous heights at numerous points in the series, but no such scheme was quite as extravagant as the one in “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” in which Pierce convinces the study group (minus Jeff) that he is on his deathbed and wishes to leave them with parting “gifts” that threaten to tear apart their psyches.
Though each of Pierce’s presents is surreptitiously demonic, perhaps the worst is the one reserved for his greatest adversary — telling Jeff that he tracked down Jeff’s father leads to the former lawyer outing Pierce as a fraud and beating him senseless in the hospital parking lot. However, the episode did feature the rare showing of Pierce’s humanity when he gave Annie a tiara simply for being his favorite.
The Time He Tried to Kill Fat Neil During the Anti-Suicide D&D Game
Er, sorry, just Neil. The Season Two episode “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” is infamous in more ways than one — firstly, for how NBC decided to scrub the episode over an appearance by Señor Chang in elven blackface, a costume deemed distasteful by the characters themselves, and for featuring maybe the most maniacal scheme Pierce ever hatched. Insulted that he was left out of a Dungeons & Dragons session designed to divert Neil from his suicidal ideation, Pierce crashes the game and plots to kill Neil’s painstakingly developed character — and, by extension, Neil himself.
As was often the case, the rest of the study group managed to band together and narrowly thwart Pierce’s sadistic scheme. Though Pierce failed to find his humanity before his defeat, he is redeemed by Neil’s declaration that the D&D session was one of the best he’d ever had.
