The Iconic Chandler Character Trait Matthew Perry Hated On Friends

Any “Friends” fan knows that Chandler Bing had a very specific way of speaking — he would sometimes emphasize the word in a sentence that shouldn’t be emphasized for comedic effect.

In his 2022 memoir, titled “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Matthew Perry explained that he came up with that little gag when he was younger to be funny. “I was back in Ottawa with my childhood friends, the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had,” Perry wrote in the book (per Deadline). “I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades. For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance.” The effect would be known as “Chandler Speak.” 

However, it got old. Perry “had to beg the producers” of “Friends” to stop writing his lines like that. Perry said in his memoir, “That particular cadence — could it be more annoying? — had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I’d explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in season six and then beyond” (via Variety).