As a voice of his generation, Matthew Perry’s was the one with the sarcasm.
“I’m Chandler. I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable,” says his signature character, Chandler Bing, in one episode of “Friends,” meeting an awkward moment with a self-deprecating grin and a quip that sums up Perry’s crucial role in the comedy.
Of the sitcom’s six core cast members, Perry had the punchlines with the most bite. After absorbing yet another befuddled remark by his roommate, Matt LeBlanc’s Joey, Chandler deadpans, “OK, you have to stop the Q-tip when there’s resistance.” Perry’s lines were a catalog of Gen X culture, with jokes involving the specifics of “Three’s Company,” “The Waltons” and other references shared by audiences of his age raised in 1970s and ‘80s America.
To younger “Friends” fans—Millennials and Gen Zers—who eventually found the show in their own eras, the sardonic tone of Perry’s character could sound as anachronistic as his pop-culture vocab. And they loved him for it.
“Even from the first episodes, he had these one-liners that really hit me,” said 25-year-old Nikita Limoran of Toronto, describing how Chandler’s edge made him funny and endearing but also refreshing to young people who came of age with different social norms. “Everyone’s a little more sensitive now, so it’s hard to be that sarcastic as he was toward other people. They’d be like, ‘What did you say?!’ You have to be careful with your words.”
Limoran was among the “Friends” fans of many age groups paying respects to Perry in New York on Sunday, the day after news broke of the actor’s death at age 54. On the corner of Bedford Street and Grove Street in Greenwich Village, they visited the site that served as the exterior for the apartment building where the fictional Chandler and friends lived. Fans stood quietly under umbrellas in the rain, taking pictures and adding to a pile of flower bouquets and handmade signs. One message of mourning echoed Perry’s way with ironic punchlines that influenced the way America talked: “Could saying goodbye BE anymore difficult.”
The way fans remembered Perry was inextricable from their feelings about Chandler, the character’s interplay with his five best friends and his hundreds of laugh lines penned by series creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane and their writers.
But Perry himself identified with Chandler, and not just because that was the actor’s most successful role. The anxious energy and syncopated comedic timing that he injected in the character was personal.
As Perry wrote in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” “When I read the script for [‘Friends’] it was as if someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life…it wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler. I was Chandler.”
Starting in 1994, “Friends” ran for 10 seasons on NBC and became one of the biggest hits of its era. Two decades after the 2004 finale, Perry and his castmates again became a fixture for young viewers who adopted the show, especially through Netflix. All 236 episodes were instantly watchable (and rewatchable) there between 2015 to 2019, after which it moved to the rival service now called Max.
Like certain vintage sitcoms, especially “The Office,” “Friends” provided millennial and Gen Z audiences with a network of personalities that felt as relevant as their outfits and hairstyles were dated. They bought “Friends” shirts at Hot Topic stores and took online personality quizzes to find out if they were a Chandler or a Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Ross or a Rachel.
Yet Perry’s character was also a prime example of 20th-century sitcom humor hitting sour notes for audiences of today. In social media rants and web articles with headlines like “10 Chandler Quotes That Prove he is the Worst,” viewers have laid out traits and bits that seem problematic in hindsight. For example, Chandler’s many fat jokes about his eventual wife Monica, played by Courteney Cox.
Despite reminders of the cringier side of the slacker generation, Perry created a character with a vulnerability that is endlessly relatable. Chandler is a guy trying to quit cigarettes and carrying his roommate financially and falling short of love as a grown-up. After skewering one of his friends, again, for stating the obvious, he quips, “When my parents got divorced, that’s when I started using humor as a defense mechanism.”
“That’s what made him real. He said things you were feeling,” said 19-year-old Madumita Sokkalingam. She discovered “Friends” because her father used to watch reruns of the show at their home in Bengaluru, India. Now she’s a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and came to Perry’s memorial in the Village with her own relationship to “Friends” and the actor’s indelible role.
“He was the first character I saw as a green flag, as we’d call it in our generation,” said Sokkalingam as her friend and fellow fan, 20-year-old Shakthi Sridharan, wiped away tears. “Basically, he was all the right things that you’d want to find in a person.”
Write to John Jurgensen at John.Jurgensen@wsj.com
