Could Matthew Perry’s ‘Chandler-speak’ be any more memorable?

LOS ANGELES – Matthew Perry, the actor who died Saturday at 54, had a distinctive linguistic style that he lobbed deep into the national consciousness.

His Chandler Bing on Friends was too clever and cool for traditional TV catchphrases: Try to imagine him saying “Bazinga!” or even his roommate Joey’s “How you doin’.”

It was how Perry spoke, with an infectious inflection, that pushed his musical Chandler-speak into the American vernacular.

Chandler phrased thoughts as if he were asking a question, a variation of rising uptalk. On the page, it could read as if he were seeking reassurance or confirmation rather than making a statement. But these inflections were themselves sarcastic declarations, ripostes that did not invite discussion but instead ended it.

Chandler’s verbal style, with its untraditional emphasis on certain syllables or words for comic effect, would become one of the show’s most widely imitated signatures.

The word “be” was a favourite, as in: “Could she be more out of my league?” (from the Season 1 episode The One With the Butt) or “Could we be more white trash?” (from the Season 4 episode The One With the Cuffs).

The gimmick gained more momentum as a running in-joke, with the other Friends characters quick to mimic Chandler’s delivery.

“Could that report be any later?” Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) ribbed him (from the Season 1 episode The One With the Ick Factor). Then Ross (David Schwimmer) chimed in: “The hills are alive with the sound of music.”

When Joey (Matt LeBlanc) put on all of his roommate’s clothes as an act of revenge, his punchline was straight out of the Chandler playbook: “Could I be wearing any more clothes?” (from the Season 3 episode The One Where No One’s Ready)

This wasn’t just a matter of the characters poking fun at Chandler Bing, the sarcasm king; the actors were also (gently) teasing Perry.

Chandler’s oddball cadence wasn’t purely a character invention, but something Perry used in real life.

As a schoolboy in Ottawa, he and his pals talked that way to amuse themselves; Perry consistently credited his friends Chris and Brian Murray with developing what he called the Murray-Perry Cadence.

Perry tried to use his often-deadpan, off-kilter speaking style in sitcoms before Friends, but it never quite worked.

Producers would insist that he “talk like a normal person”, he recalled last year while in Toronto to celebrate his bestselling memoir, Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing. As Perry explained in the book, “I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance.”

In Friends, he was finally allowed to dance the way he wanted. The series’ creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, were looking for an actor who had a fresh method of delivering Chandler’s particular brand of defensive humour, they explained in a Vanity Fair oral history of Friends.

When Perry read the script, he recognised himself.

“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,” he wrote in his memoir. “It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler. I was Chandler.”

Some aspects of Chandler Bing were autobiographical morsels mined from the show’s writers – a bit of Crane’s personality plus experiences borrowed from writers Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss. But much of the character’s personality, like his discomfort with silence and need to fill it with quips, came directly from Perry.

At first, the writers would underline words in the script that they hoped Perry would emphasize, but they learned that he would just emphasize a different word instead, so they started underlining the words they didn’t want him to emphasize.

“It was a funny process,” Kauffman said in an interview with Vulture. They also sometimes invited Perry to improve upon their punchlines and suggest new ones, as seen in a 1999 Discovery Channel documentary about the show.

Eventually, though, Perry got sick of using his trademark cadence. “Could it be more annoying?” he asked in his memoir.

It felt played out. Most of the characters had already mocked Chandler for it. “If I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I’d explode,” he wrote.

Whatever his feelings about his trademark during Friends, Perry in recent years seemed to have made his peace with it.

Earlier in the pandemic, he promoted T-shirts that read “Could I be any more vaccinated?” He also had a little fun at his own expense in his memoir, writing that he imagined his epitaph might be: “Here lies Matthew Perry – He broke up with Julia Roberts, or could I be more stupid or dead?”

It’s a funny line, but one that’s harder to laugh at this week. NYTIMES