The actor gave his signature character on Friends a quality that is all too rare in sitcoms: vulnerability.
In a sixth-season episode of Friends, members of the group make what they consider to be a horrifying discovery: Chandler Bing can’t cry. The revelation comes through a fluke (they’re watching ET and, confronted with the adorable alien, Chandler’s eyes stay dry). But the situation, as it so often does on Friends, quickly escalates. Before long, Joey is accusing his best friend of being “dead inside.” Monica is interrogating her husband, trawling for tears. All she succeeds in doing, though, is expanding the list of things that fail to make Chandler well up: the sight of a three-legged puppy, the death of Bambi’s mother, the thought of becoming a father.
Chandler, the episode will later reveal, is extremely capable of crying. The real punchline of “The One Where Chandler Can’t Cry,” though—and the irony—is that Chandler is, in many ways, the emotional anchor of this show. On the surface, he might seem to be the least engaging of the six friends: professionally stable, financially secure, blandly competent. His defining feature is his sarcasm. Had he been portrayed by another actor, he might have offered little more than comic relief: Chandler the smart-talker, the clown, the guy who looks at the world and sees little more than an endless joke.
Read: On Chandler Bing’s job
But Chandler was played by Matthew Perry, and the casting made all the difference. Perry, who died this weekend at the age of 54, was as gifted a dramatic actor as he was a comedic one. And he summoned both talents to create a character who is indelible precisely because he is so much more than merely funny. Perry gave Chandler a quality that is common among real people and rare among sitcom characters: vulnerability.
When Perry was cast to play Chandler, he was 24: the youngest member of the Friends ensemble, playing the character who in many ways seemed the oldest. When the show’s near-instant success brought fame, he chafed. Perry spent years fighting addiction and overcoming it. He advocated on behalf of others who fought the same battles. That work, Perry said last year, was his life’s proudest achievement. But it was work that also served the role that earned him his fame. Perry put pain into each performance.
This was, in its way, radical. Sitcoms, traditionally, erase the world’s anxieties even as they channel them. Their environments are stridently insular; their characters face problems, but rarely real precarity. Friends follows that formula so completely that it can verge on callousness. Phoebe, the show reveals, spent time living on city streets. Her mother took her own life. The series treats those details, for the most part, as extensions of Phoebe’s charming eccentricity. The characters on Friends get much of their mileage from maximalism: They are larger than life, and therefore protected from the sadness it can bring.
Except, that is, for Chandler. He has been hurt—by his parents’ divorce; by loves he has lost—and he is open about the wounds. He had a bohemian childhood (his mother wrote erotic novels; his father hosted a drag show in Las Vegas). He reacted by turning conformity into a lifestyle. He went on to resist a benchmark of maturity: the willingness to open himself up to other people.
Friends reached its juggernaut status during the period when “emotional intelligence” was transforming from a coinage into a cliché. And Chandler embodies the transformation. He is the show’s most conflicted character because he is also its most self-aware. “When my parents got divorced, that’s when I started using humor as a defense mechanism,” Chandler says at one point, and the only thing that is surprising about the diagnosis is its bluntness. Through Perry’s performance, after all, audiences already know about Chandler’s tendency to treat jokes as his shield.
With every arch comment and wry smile—with every perfectly timed pause—Perry made Chandler more complicated, and more messily human. He translated the old adage “Comedy is tragedy plus time” into the pert vernaculars of the sitcom. Chandler lives in a perpetual state of misalignment, his inner life chafing against his outer circumstances. He looks like an organization man but acts like a teenager. He has the general appearance of an adult who has mastered the art of adulting. But he is also a guy who has chosen to furnish his dining area with a foosball table, who ruins a professional opportunity because, when his interviewer mentions “duties,” he is unable to stifle his amusement. If Friends is a show about growing up, its interest is centered on Chandler: Will he grow up? Can he?
That is why Friends was able to treat Chandler’s tears as a plot point. His ability to cry mattered because Perry made it matter. “It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything’s possible,” the show’s initial pitch promised. Chandler, though, is Friends’ most acute acknowledgement of the other side of that guarantee: Adulthood is a steady act of compromise. To grow up is to recognize how many things won’t be possible. Chandler spent 10 seasons learning that. That he laughed as he did so made the lesson even more poignant.
What Matthew Perry Knew About Comedy
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31.10.2023
The actor gave his signature character on Friends a quality that is all too rare in sitcoms: vulnerability.
In a sixth-season episode of Friends, members of the group make what they consider to be a horrifying discovery: Chandler Bing can’t cry. The revelation comes through a fluke (they’re watching ET and, confronted with the adorable alien, Chandler’s eyes stay dry). But the situation, as it so often does on Friends, quickly escalates. Before long, Joey is accusing his best friend of being “dead inside.” Monica is interrogating her husband, trawling for tears. All she succeeds in doing, though, is expanding the list of things that fail to make Chandler well up: the sight of a three-legged puppy, the death of Bambi’s mother, the thought of becoming a father.
Chandler, the episode will later reveal, is extremely capable of crying. The real punchline of “The One Where Chandler Can’t Cry,” though—and the irony—is that Chandler is, in many ways, the emotional anchor of this show. On the surface, he might seem to be the least engaging of the six friends: professionally stable, financially secure, blandly competent. His defining feature is his sarcasm. Had he been portrayed by another actor, he might have offered little more than comic relief: Chandler the smart-talker, the clown, the guy........
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