Matthew Perry, the Friend we wished we had
Though the actor did other work, he remains Chandler Bing, our friend. And we would be well served to remember that friends who make too many jokes may be hurting on the inside
Matthew Perry taught me the word ‘vestibule.’ In the Friends episode ‘The One With The Blackout’ — season 1, episode 7, streaming in India on Netflix — Perry’s character Chandler Bing finds himself trapped by an ATM with a Victoria’s Secret model. I had wrongly assumed it was called “an ATM machine”, but Chandler Bing was incapable of using a tautology — and therefore referring to it as an Automatic Teller Machine machine. Even when entirely befuddled and out of his depth and unable to make basic conversation, he couldn’t possibly get a word wrong.
Perry delivered Chandler’s lines as if walking perpetually with an invisible microphone, ready to be dropped at a moment’s notice. In early seasons, that was his only job, to skewer and eye-roll and say something pithy that slices instantly through a potentially mawkish moment. The deck was stacked, of course, with writers giving Perry the smartest and most quotable lines. One can’t blame the writers, given the actor’s command of pauses, timing and his superhuman ability to audibly italicise words he wanted: could there be a better delivery of a one-liner?
This marked Chandler as ‘the funny one’ in a sitcom, where everybody is meant to be funny to some degree. This is quite remarkable. Using Friends shorthand, we have all known a Joey, a guy who takes a little longer to get a joke, a Monica, who takes board-game rules and tidying up too seriously, a Phoebe, who will flake out in spectacular and unpredictable ways, a Rachel who is visibly more spoiled than you are, and a Ross who may either geek out too hard about something interesting only to themselves, or spend too long whining over a crush.
Chandler, on the other hand, was a moment. You or a friend could come up with a Chandler-esque turn of phrase, but that would be that. Chandler Bing — the witty one with a line that changed the moment — was the friend we wished we had.
He was also the biggest misfit. Chandler had the most troubled and traumatised childhood, a job nobody quite knew about, and struggled with trying to pivot to a second career relatively late in life, where he started off as an overage intern. The quips were a mask he wore to shield his many insecurities, something the character openly admits on the show: “Hi, I’m Chandler,” he introduces, “I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable.”
Admittedly not his funniest line, that is the quote being thrown around most frequently this week as Perry tragically passed away this weekend, found dead in his hot tub at the cruelly young age of 54. The reason is that the line cuts deep — bleeding from the character into the actor who had a troubled and tumultuous life. From supermodels to supercars, Perry embraced the flashier upside of celebrity with gusto. One of the most recognisable men on the planet, the actor battled substance issues, addiction issues and severe health issues.
