Joey comes from an Italian American family of eight children. His father, for whom Joey is named, is a pipefitter. Joey has seven sisters: Mary Therese, Mary Angela (with whom Chandler fooled around at Joey's birthday party), Dina, Gina, Tina, Veronica, and Cookie. Joey is from, and was presumably born in, Queens, New York. As a child, he was extremely accident prone. He also had an imaginary friend, Maurice, who was a space cowboy.
Joey is portrayed as promiscuous and dim-witted, but very loyal and protective of his friends. As a struggling actor, he is constantly looking for work. He was ordained as a minister in "The One with the Truth About London", and officiated at both Monica and Chandler and Phoebe and Mike's weddings. It is revealed in The One After "I Do" that Joey has size seven feet, which he is secretive and defensive about. He also has a soft toy penguin named Hugsy (his "bedtime penguin pal"), whom he is very fond of and does not like to share. He also doesn't like sharing food and has difficulty with simple mathematics (evidenced by his using a calculator to add together 500 and 500). In sports, Joey likes the Los Angeles Dodgers,New York Yankees, and briefly the New York Mets in baseball, Los Angeles Clippers and New York Knicks in basketball, New York Giants and New York Jets in football, and the New York Rangers in hockey.
Joey is characterized as a simple-minded but good-natured womanizer who loves food. He particularly loves meatball sub sandwiches. When asked if he would give up sex or food he had trouble deciding and kept blurting out sex or food, eventually yelling "I want girls on bread!". In The One with the Ride Along, he appears to be saving Ross from a putative gunshot, when it was actually his meatball sandwich that he was trying to save; it was just near Ross. He also loves the "Joey Special" — two pizzas. He is something of an idiot savant in general, but capable of good ideas when the situation arises; this is alluded to in the episode "The One Where Ross Dates a Student", when Chandler, referring to Joey, says "A hot girl's at stake and suddenly he's Rain Man" when Joey suggested Ross work out who among his students called him the 'hottie of the paleontology department' by comparing the handwriting of the note to the handwriting in the class essays. In another example, Joey made up an anecdote referred to as the "Europe story" or the "magic story"; apparently, anyone who hears it will immediately want to have sex with the teller. This was proven to be effective in "The One With the Videotape", when it was discovered that Rachel successfully used the story on Ross (although, as Ross was aware of the story beforehand, the mere fact of Rachel using it would have been enough to imply that she was hitting on him). He is also clever at other times, for example, in "The One With Ross’s Teeth", while the other five friends sat around at Central Perk pondering why their bosses don't like them, it was Joey who pointed out, "Maybe it's because you're all sitting around here at 11:30 on a Wednesday."
Joey is extremely promiscuous with women, often relying on his catchphrase pickup line "How you doin'?". In "The One with Monica's Thunder", Chandler asks Joey, "You've had a lot of sex, right?", to which Joey replies, "Today? Some ... not a lot." He sleeps with many of the interns and extras on shows on which he works (Although he was prepared to decline an offer to have sex with a casting agent because he wanted to be cast for his acting skills rather than his sexual performance; his integrity prompted the agent to give him a bigger part than the one he originally auditioned for, but he still slept with her to get it). He has apparently been sexually active for a very long time; he undid a 16-year-old girl's bra when he was nine, slept with his teacher in the seventh grade, and he had a wild spring break when he was 13. However, in the episode "The One with Ross's Sandwich", Chandler and Monica attempted to cover up their fling by claiming Joey was a sex-addict, and Joey was outraged at the accusation. He is very charming to all women but can never seem to get into a committed relationship.
