Said Lady Gaga to Lisa Kudrow on the "Friends" reunion, quoted in "'Friends: The Reunion': 5 Things We Learned/You might think there’s nothing more to know about the show and its cast, but the reunion special, which premiered Thursday on HBO Max, reveals a few things" (NYT).
I watched it, and in fact, I have watched every episode of "Friends" — all, save one, in the last few years. I came to the show familiar with only one of the performers, and that was Lisa Kudrow. I considered "The Comeback" the best TV comedy ever, and I'd always been a big fan of the movie "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."
But I didn't really like hearing Lady Gaga say that Kudrow's character was "the one that was really herself." The others were... what? Really somebody other than themselves? Maybe Gaga doesn't have facility with language, but I think she deliberately said something challenging, because she prefaced the remark with "I don’t know if this is the right way to say it." Well, the rest of us don't know what "it" is. My interpretation was that she meant to characterize Phoebe (Kudrow's character) as the outsider. In that light, perhaps it's comforting and exciting for many viewers to see that character gets to be with the other 5. The idea seems to be that the popular kids include one oddball in their group, as if that must be every oddball's dream.
Gaga's theory — as I understand it — is a putdown of the rest of the characters — and of the entire show — who are all outsiders in their own way.
Another issue with the Gaga appearance: Was it at the expense of Chrissie Hynde? The Gaga bit used material from the episode — "The One with the Baby on the Bus" — that had Chrissie Hynde playing "Smelly Cat" with Phoebe. If I had to look at pop stars to find the different one, or the one that was really herself, I'd pick Hynde before Gaga. The disinclusion troubles me. The show is all about keeping the original group together (even though — spoiler alert — the series refrained from ending with each of the characters married to one of the others (4 ended up in Friend-on-Friend couples, but they brought in an outsider to marry Phoebe, and they left Joey without a love of his life)).
ADDED: Here's Chrissie Hynde on the show:
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3 comments:
Tom T. writes:
"Phoebe (like Joey) was a cartoon and a plot device. She was the wacky sitcom friend who could never exist in reality, because no one would want to be friends with her, and her buffoonery would interfere with day-to-day life. Lady Gaga is praising Kudrow simply because her character was outlandishly weird, and it seems like a sad commentary on Gaga's own persona that she thinks the character that was most thoroughly a creature of her handlers was somehow most "herself.""
If you look at each of them individually, you could very well wonder why would anyone want to be friends with any of them (other than that they're all, or almost all, very good looking).
Deevs writes:
"Wasn't Phoebe the biggest hypocrite of the group? My recollection is that she was always acting against her supposed convictions as soon as they became even slightly inconvenient. That makes for good comedy but not characters worthy of praise. I guess being quirky covers a multitude of sins, at least for Lady Gaga."
Hypocrisy is funny. Virtue isn't funny!
Let me recommend "The One with the Yeti" — where Phoebe tries justify wearing a mink coat: Minks are jerks.
K writes:
"Reminiscent of Dylan's appearance at the end of a Dharma & Greg episode in 1999."
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