Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs Are the Best Part of “Community”
The hilarious, gorgeous girls of “Community” on why sex is funny (in a good way).
By Daniel Riley
GQ, August 2011
They spend a lot of time together, these two, making their scrappy, genre-warping sitcom, “Community,” posing for instantly viral almost-make-out TwitPics, and hanging off-set with their lace-tight castmates. What we’re saying—as if the photo isn’t evidence enough—is there’s sugar between these two, they’re a team. “With a shoot like this,” Alison Brie (left) says, “you’re negotiating these positions together: ’Can you move your crotch a little to the left? Really get it up there.’ ”
“The next day we were texting each other,” Gillian Jacobs adds. ” ’Are you sore, too?’ ”
“Community,” now two seasons deep, seemed to figure itself out almost instantly—embracing weird, risky habits like engineering entire episodes as film parodies and building in layers-deep Easter eggs for its devotees. Not to mention the wire-sharp quips traded by the members of the show’s lightly dysfunctional study group.
Brie’s character, Annie, who protests indecency in a register that conjures a conductor on his tiptoes, couldn’t be more of an innocent, fizzy contradiction to the actress. Annie, on “Community”: never seen a penis. Brie, in an essay she wrote about deflowering her gay friend: “My vagina would have been his road to salvation!” Which is to say, the girls are willing to embrace the funny in sex. “It’s just so deadly serious to each of us but hilarious to everyone else,” Jacobs says. “When you’re having sex with someone,” Brie adds, “it really is similar to putting yourself out there and saying, ’I think this is funny and I hope you laugh.’ ”
“Fake it till you make it,” Jacobs says. “That’s what my drama teacher used to say.”
Brie: “I don’t think she was talking about sex.”
Jacobs, whose Britta has “slept with two-thirds of the male population” at the show’s school, is playing opposites, too: “The episode where I made out with my supposed lesbian friend was the first time I’d kissed a girl. I was terrified.”
Brie: “Aw, Gil! You should have let me know! We could have practiced!”