In a lavish New York apartment above a coffee shop, after taking unwarranted potshots at multiple scene-mates in the very first episode of Friends, Chandler Bing gets up from the table, walks over to the door, sighs, and says, “All right, kids, I gotta get to work. If I don’t input those numbers.” Then he raises his eyebrows, considers the end of that sentence, flicks his head, and delivers what he knows is a veritable punchline, “It doesn’t make much of a difference.” Cue the laugh track. Self-deprecatory humour aside, Matthew Perry, who died in his California apartment last week, made no secret of his similarity to Chandler, the character he portrayed on Friends for 10 years. Perry frequently collaborated with the show’s writers to infuse his own personality into the character’s lore – both were children of divorce, had social anxiety, commitment issues, and used humour as a defence mechanism. On his comedic style, he told The New York Times last year, “(At my audition) I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit. I didn't know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades.” That’s modest. Self-deprecation, irony, dark humour – whatever name you give it – has become the form of humour for my generation, those born after 1996. Chandler was of a different era – probably born sometime in the 1970s, growing up in the free-market hullaballoo of Ronald Reagen, landing a lucrative job notoriously difficult to describe (“He's a transponster!” yells Rachel in Season 4 in a moment of crisis, forgetting that he deals with “statistical analysis and data reconfiguration.”) But his job dissatisfaction and social anxieties – “Hi, I’m Chandler and I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable” or “I’m hopeless and awkward and desperate for love” – are universal and timeless. They are also, somehow, specific to my generation: widening income inequality, higher-than-ever property and college costs, irreversible climate crises, and genocidal politicians – all under the unrelentingly public gaze of social media – have made daily life for the under-30 urban Indian a little desperate. These concerns represent the failure of the dreams of India’s educated class, a failure that Chandler – despite making all the right career moves in 1990s America to become the richest in his friend group – seemed to have internalised. His only coping mechanism? Bleak and sarcastic jokes. But surely Chandler’s brand of humour cannot be laid claim to by just Gen Z (the generation born in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Dark humour can be traced back to at least fifth century BC playwright Aristophanes, and, more recently, the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift. Irony became prominent after World War II to take down popular politics of the day. Even millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) have claim to Gen Z’s nihilistic and activist online humour, having experienced cataclysmic paradigm shifts like 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis at a young age. But here’s the difference. Wherein Chandler often seeks refuge in irony (“I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?”) Gen Z resorts to, as argued by critic Greg Guevara in a 2020 video essay, “post-irony” – a kind of irony that’s only funny if you know the comedian or their body of work. For instance, suppose a comedian online makes an impassioned appeal to eradicate feminism, but you know their persona/work to be generally quite feminist, it may make their original appeal (“Let’s eradicate feminism!”) seem like a satirical portrayal of a character, funny only to those familiar with the persona Does that sound disagreeable? Morally dubious? Risqué? It is. The true intent behind this kind of humour becomes incredibly difficult to decipher. Chandler would have loved it. In the 1990s, American writer David Foster Wallace warned of irony and post-irony as having outlived their usefulness in art and culture, with a more constructive coping/protesting mechanism necessary, “Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naïve to all the weary ironists.” He might have found an interesting case study in Perry, a man famous for sarcasm but earnest in leaving behind a legacy of rehabilitation and hope. His on-screen persona may have worried about never escaping his traumas or making a difference, but I hope he didn't worry too much – off-screen, he did enough.
