In a sixth-season episode of Pals, members of the group make what they contemplate to be a horrifying discovery: Chandler Bing can’t cry. The revelation comes by a fluke (they’re watching E.T. and, confronted with the cute alien, Chandler’s eyes keep dry). However the scenario, because it so usually does on Pals, rapidly escalates. Earlier than lengthy, Joey is accusing his finest good friend of being “useless inside.” Monica is interrogating her husband, trawling for tears. All she succeeds in doing, although, is increasing the listing of issues that fail to make Chandler effectively up: the sight of a three-legged pet, the dying of Bambi’s mom, the considered changing into a father.
Chandler, the episode will later reveal, is extraordinarily able to crying. The actual punchline of “The One The place Chandler Can’t Cry,” although—and the irony—is that Chandler is, in some ways, the emotional anchor of this present. On the floor, he may appear to be the least partaking of the six associates: professionally secure, financially safe, blandly competent. His defining characteristic is his sarcasm. Had he been portrayed by one other actor, he might need provided little greater than comedian reduction: Chandler the smart-talker, the clown, the man who appears on the world and sees little greater than an countless joke.
However Chandler was performed by Matthew Perry, and the casting made all of the distinction. Perry, who died this weekend on the age of 54, was as gifted a dramatic actor as he was a comedic one. And he summoned each skills to create a personality who’s indelible exactly as a result of he’s a lot greater than merely humorous. Perry gave Chandler a top quality that’s widespread amongst actual individuals and uncommon amongst sitcom characters: vulnerability.
When Perry was solid to play Chandler, he was 24: the youngest member of the Pals ensemble, enjoying the character who in some ways appeared the oldest. When the present’s near-instant success introduced fame, he chafed. Perry spent years preventing habit and overcoming it. He advocated on behalf of others who fought the identical battles. That work, Perry mentioned final yr, was his life’s proudest achievement. However it was work that additionally served the function that earned him his fame. Perry put ache into every efficiency.
This was, in its method, radical. Sitcoms, historically, erase the world’s anxieties at the same time as they channel them. Their environments are stridently insular; their characters face issues, however hardly ever actual precarity. Pals follows that method so fully that it may well verge on callousness. Phoebe, the present reveals, hung out dwelling on metropolis streets. Her mom took her personal life. The sequence treats these particulars, for essentially the most half, as extensions of Phoebe’s charming eccentricity. The characters on Pals get a lot of their mileage from maximalism: They’re bigger than life and due to this fact shielded from the disappointment it may well deliver.
Besides, that’s, for Chandler. He has been harm—by his mother and father’ divorce, by loves he has misplaced—and he’s open concerning the wounds. He had a bohemian childhood (his mom wrote erotic novels; his father hosted a drag present in Las Vegas). He reacted by turning conformity into a way of life. He went on to withstand a benchmark of maturity: the willingness to open himself as much as different individuals.
Pals reached its juggernaut standing throughout the interval when “emotional intelligence” was remodeling from a coinage right into a cliché. And Chandler embodies the transformation. He’s the present’s most conflicted character as a result of he’s additionally its most self-aware. “When my mother and father acquired divorced, that’s after I began utilizing humor as a protection mechanism,” Chandler says at one level, and the one factor that’s stunning concerning the analysis is its bluntness. By means of Perry’s efficiency, in any case, audiences already find out about Chandler’s tendency to deal with jokes as his defend.
With each arch remark and wry smile, with each completely timed pause, Perry made Chandler extra difficult, and extra messily human. He translated the previous adage “Comedy is tragedy plus time” into the pert vernaculars of the sitcom. Chandler lives in a perpetual state of misalignment, his inside life chafing in opposition to his outer circumstances. He appears like a company man however acts like a teen. He has the final look of an grownup who has mastered the artwork of adulting. However he’s additionally a man who has chosen to furnish his eating space with a foosball desk, who ruins knowledgeable alternative as a result of, when his interviewer mentions “duties,” he’s unable to stifle his amusement. If Pals is a present about rising up, its curiosity is centered on Chandler: Will he develop up? Can he?
That’s the reason Pals was in a position to deal with Chandler’s tears as a plot level. His capability to cry mattered as a result of Perry made it matter. “It’s about intercourse, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when all the pieces’s attainable,” the present’s preliminary pitch promised. Chandler, although, is Pals’ most acute acknowledgement of the opposite facet of that assure: Maturity is a gradual act of compromise. To develop up is to acknowledge what number of issues received’t be attainable. Chandler spent 10 seasons studying that. That he laughed as he did so made the lesson much more poignant.
