Such sentiments seem, in one way, fitting. Jerry—wearer of plaid, taker of naps, frequenter of a dinosaur-themed restaurant named Jurassic Fork—has a way of angering people by virtue of his very blandness. Which may be why he has the unenviable distinction of being an ongoing victim of mockery on a show otherwise known for its niceness. Parks and Rec is often compared to Friday Night Lights, and it is, like NBC’s other series about passionate underdogs, bursting with the mix of hilarity and humanity we tend to shorthand as “heart.” Parks, at its gooey caramel core, is, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert summed it up, “about people trying to do good in the world.”

But then, awkwardly … there’s Jerry. Who has been on the receiving end of more outright, unexplained cruelty than any character from any TV comedy in recent memory. There’s the jar Jerry's coworkers put money into every time he does something mockable—funds they use, in a tradition known as “the Jerry Dinner,” to finance a nice meal that purposely does not include its namesake. There’s the time Leslie, pointing to a poster she’s mocked up of her colleague, declares that “Jerry’s face is the symbol of failure.” There's the time Andy, in extreme slow motion, smashes a pie into Jerry's face. There’s the time Jerry has a heart attack (an event proceeded by a string of Gergichian flatulence)—which is also the time Tom, rather than expressing concern for his coworker, bemoans people's failure to make a joke about a “fart attack.”

Haha? Sort of? “Dammit, Jerry!” runs like a refrain through Parks' seven seasons, reminding us that the world consists of cool and uncool people, and there are dire consequences for occupying the wrong category. Ron, at one point, describes Jerry as both a schlemiel and a schlimazel—meaning that “he is both the person who spills the soup and the person upon whom the soup is spilled.”

The Jerry-slandering hasn't been limited to the residents of Pawnee. The show’s writers, too, often seemed to have it out for their creation. All that farting! All that tripping! The fact that Jerry's idea of a dream vacation is escaping to his time-share in Muncie, and that he types his presentations to coworkers in Comic Sans, and that he is genuinely happy to receive, in lieu of a better present, socks! ("You can never," Jerry points out, "have too many socks.") When he was a teenager, in 1964, Jerry starred in a school production of Peter Pan … and made “a beautiful Tinkerbell." In an episode in Season Two, he lies about getting mugged in a public park (having, in actuality, fallen into a river chasing after a dropped burrito); the show effectively punishes him for the dishonesty by having him, during a presentation to the Parks Department, knock over an easel, and then, while bending over to retrieve it, splitting his pants and farting into the split. Another early episode, which finds city employees engaged in a competition to discover each others’ biggest secrets, features the following exchange between Mark Brandanowicz, Pawnee's city planner, and Jerry:

Jerry: “A little birdie told me you have two unpaid parking tickets.” Mark: “Well, a little birdie told me your adoptive mother was arrested for marijuana possession.” [Everyone laughs. Jerry stays silent.] Mark: “Oh, you didn’t know about that?” Jerry: “I didn’t know I was adopted.”

It’s a scene, apparently, that was a turning point for Jerry’s character. Writing it, Mike Schur, Parks’ showrunner, told the A.V. Club, “we realized that’s who he is: He’s the guy who wants to put his head down and get his pension, but is asking for it all the time. In the next three scripts—it was like throwing chum into the water—every script after that had 15 slams on Jerry.”