It’s still Keeping It Short Week, with every post 250 words or less:
I wouldn’t say I was a huge Friends fan … and yet, I watched nearly all of its 236 episodes.
It was in the air in the 1990s, a candy-coloured fantasy of twentysomething life. It began in 1994 just a few weeks after I spent a pinched, impoverished summer living in New York City, and its sitcom world of waitresses and unemployed actors living in luxurious lofts was not reality to me.
Still, Friends was diverting and served up an image of life as breezy comic fun, and honestly, the main reason I ended up watching as much as I did was always Matthew Perry’s sarcastic Chandler Bing, the prickly joker in the deck of shiny gorgeous faces. When Perry died this weekend at just 54, it stung. He was my favourite Friend, the one I could most imagine having a beer with, in many ways the most human of the lot.
The wisecracking guy was already a well-worn sitcom trope when Perry came along, but he added a bit of Gen-X irreverence to Chandler. Sure, he had the same romantic misadventures as the rest of the Friends, but Perry added a slight wink to the role. “Could this be any more cliched,” you could almost hear him saying.
In real life Perry was battling addiction for years and maybe, just maybe, those inner turmoils gave him a little more weight in the role of Chandler. The joker jokes to keep the tears from coming, you see.
Nik Dirga 