Jay and Silent Bob - Character Profiles

Character Profiles

Jay and Silent Bob are said to have been born in Leonardo, New Jersey in the early 1970s. They met as infants in front of Quick Stop Groceries while their mothers shopped inside RST Video, as seen in the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Silent Bob's distinguishing features are his heavy smoking, massive cocaine use, long coat, dark hair, beard, and backwards baseball cap. He was raised Catholic, and is a gadgetry genius. True to his name, Silent Bob rarely speaks but when he does he often has something profound or thoughtful to say, delivering insightful monologues to the other characters only in appropriate situations. Otherwise he relies on hand gestures and facial expressions to communicate. Silent Bob is often irritated by Jay and when Silent Bob does speak, he will sometimes criticize Jay, particularly in Chasing Amy (in which Silent Bob gave his longest speech) and in Clerks II. In Clerks: The Animated Series, Bob is called "Blutarsky", but according to Smith, that was a joke referencing Animal House and he never gave Bob a last name.

Jay is thinner and slightly taller than Bob, and has long blond hair. In several of the later View Askewniverse films, Jay wears a black tuque. In contrast to Bob, Jay speaks frequently and crudely and often treats people with cruelty or disrespect, including Silent Bob. Jay's excessive cursing seems due to influence from his overbearing mother, who is shown continually using profanity in front of him. His first word was "fuck". In Clerks, the first film to feature the duo, Jay wears a baseball cap.

Kevin Smith has stated that he sees Jay as ambisexual: "Jay — who's always talking about women — is a character a lot of young hetero guys identify with. But I think Jay's really ambisexual. So it's nice to throw them a curveball to open up their perspective a bit. If I can lead a few cats into being a bit more tolerant, I feel pretty good." In issue #2 of the Chasing Dogma comic series, Jay launches into a lengthy and thoroughly impassioned impromptu speech on gay rights and tolerance before he notices Silent Bob's astonished expression and brushes the matter off. Moreover, in the prison scene in Clerks II, Jay wants Dante and Randal to fellate each other in exchange for him and Silent Bob loaning them the money to reopen the Quick Stop and RST. He may say this merely to get Dante and Randal to humiliate themselves, but after Silent Bob's disgusted look, he retracts the demand. In a cut version of the same scene, Silent Bob tells Jay that he is a deeply repressed gay man.