Finding an unlikely role model in Chandler Bing

These places, like smoothies, have the stupidest names, so stupid that when you say them aloud, you wince, because you know the very leaving of the words from your mouth means you’re committing to going.

You can’t rationally suggest such a thing to a child under 10 years of age and then retract it. The mere mention of the words “Funky Monkeys”, even by accident, is the signing of a contract, only broken by death. If you even think about the place, you’re going.

The weather on this day is an absolute scandal, your kids deserve to be happy. You, on the other hand, deserve nothing. You have no choice. Funky Monkeys it is.

So, as you sit there in the fog of whatever airborne virus is incubating around you, you bravely resist the temptation of taking out your phone and scrolling X, formerly known as Twitter.

Lately, the news regularly reduces you to a red-eyed, angry mess, logging on, as you do, with the innocent intention of watching montages of Springbok flanker Pieter-Steph du Toit making huge tackles, but it only takes a minute before you’re sucked into a vortex of grief so profound, it could render you catatonic.

The patrons of Funky Monkeys don’t need your existential turmoil, everyone is already suffering enough. You leave the phone where it is, and instead stare into space and think about coffee.

A fellow father offers a comforting eye roll of solidarity, as his own kid licks the entire surface of a ball plucked from a bottomless ball pond. 

Who is this man, you think? Does he feel the same way? Did he begin the day thinking — just as you had — that he’d practice positive parenting on the strand, in Enniscrone?

Your younger kid learning how to surf big waves, while the older one, a little less independent but morally more centred, ethically harvests seaweed before donating the profits to a food NGO?

Did he foresee a car trip that sounded less like Handel’s Messiah and more like the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan?

Did he, like you, wonder why the hell he hadn’t stopped for a double macchiato along the way?

“Chandler Bing is dead,” the man says, without preamble or warning, so spontaneously that you doubt he said anything at all.

Confused, you reach for your phone, and there it is, previewed on your screen, meaning you don’t even have to open it.

Actor Matthew Perry, dead, 54.

I drank a lot of coffee in my late teenage years. By coffee, I don’t mean handpicked beans from Pangalengan Highlands of West Java, Indonesia, but Nescafé, from a glass jar, usually drank about an hour before bed, a semi-reward after a night of supposed study for my Leaving Cert.

It was the late 90s, and, perhaps in the relative agricultural settings of West Mayo, drinking coffee — instant granulated coffee — was a subconscious nod to one of the formative influences of my early adulthood — Matthew Perry’s character in Friends, Chandler Bing.

He was, after all, the funny one.

The relatable one

The guy, who for a long time, was much more relatable than his co-stars Matt Le Blanc and David Schwimmer.

Not smart enough to be a palaeontologist, nor hunky enough to be a womanising actor, instead, he had a job nobody ever understood and an awkwardness that was incredibly Irish.

His humour was his weapon, his body armour, and his white flag of surrender. He was an unlikely role model, but he was a very believable one.

That he did most of his best work in a coffee house — a place we scarcely knew existed in the back arse of Mayo — was a prescient nod to a culture we would all become part of.

The coffee culture. The act of going to a social place, sitting aimlessly with friends, and talking.

Or not talking. Listening and pretending to listen. A neat alternative to the pub, where the high stool and the village idiot were the idioms we were much too used to. The cast of Friends was hardly the first to do it, but they were the funniest, and Chandler Bing was the funniest of the funniest.

It seems obsolete to say, but in the grander scheme of things, the death of a Hollywood actor, who, by his own reckoning, spent at least $7m trying to get himself sober, is hardly deserving of too much deep contemplation, not when the world seems so cruel and hopeless.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, Matthew Perry’s passing last weekend took on an unusual significance. Perhaps because Friends, the show that both made and ended him, was the ultimate comfort blanket, a televisual refuge where all of us could take a little shelter.

His death was a sad reminder that the world we watched him in was make-believe, even if his comic timing was very, very real.

Back to Ireland in the 90s. Before mobile phones and the internet, for many parents, Australian TV shows Home and Away and Neighbours were the devil’s work.

So distracted were they from protecting us from the pregnancy-obsessed runaway teenagers of Summer Bay and Yabbie Creek, they completely missed the emergence of Friends,

The show covered themes each one of us could relate to, if not then as teenagers, eventually as adults.

Being alone, finding your tribe, unemployment, your friends having money when you don’t, f*cked up family, divorce — each one got its time in the dock, and though the appropriateness with which they were developed varied (Fat Monica, bad trans and gay jokes, and an almost exclusively white cast are among the “what aged the worst” aspects of the show), the comedy always won through.

So too, the disproving of the notion that you had to be related to someone, or in love with them, to actually love someone. To put it simply, Friends redefined our idea of family.

Central to that was the chemistry between Perry’s Chandler and Matt LeBlanc’s Joey, the smart, funny one, and the handsome oaf. 

The original sit-com bromance, the pair did all the things guys who live together in their 20s will forever do — drink beer, fall out over girls, raise ducks together, practice kissing on each other — but it’s only when the pair fight and fall out, that you understand the depth of their love for each other.

For a generation of us who grew up calling our first girlfriends from payphones in the lashing rain, Chandler and Joey’s trials and triumphs were entirely relatable.

So too, was that rarely explored dynamic of leaving your best friends behind when you start a relationship with someone else, a breakup often just as traumatically profound as the conventional romantic version.

As true now as it was then, Perry and LeBlanc embodied the perennial struggle we all face of trying to figure out where exactly we fit in, not just in a big city, but in a room full of people.

And boy did they make us laugh doing it.

In Funky Monkeys last Saturday, lost as I was in a foam maze, surrounded by giant footballs (not a metaphor), I thought of Chandler Bing and how this centre of soft play on such an apocalyptic day would be the perfect canvas for his comic timing.

Other people’s children. Distracted parents. Disinterested employees. Disgusting coffee.

Such mundane characters and props were all the materials he’d need, to dance his theatrical dance, over-emphasise some syllables, and drop a series of sarcastic one-liners nobody would pick up on but us — the audience — understanding, as we all do, the loneliness of the joke made, but never heard.