Friends Thru A Lens: Phoebe's Upsetting Childhood with Ryan Farrell

0:05Hello and welcome to Friends Through a Lens, the podcast where I talk to my real life friends about the show Friends through a lens of their choosing. My name is Carolyn Dunhu and I got hepatitis from the time a pimp spit in my mouth. And joining me is someone who knows that you never run on a barge. It's Ryan Farrell. Never. Never! Never, mother. Hi. Hi. So today we're talking about Friends through the lens of sort of Phoebe, Phoebe's upsetting childhood, Phoebe's upsetting backstory. and I'm really like I don't know if we'll be doing in this series an episode per friend I'm really leaving it up to the discretion of whoever comes on but I'm really glad that we're doing a whole episode on Phoebe because she's a character who I love and I think has gotten the short shrift over the last you know over many years of discussion of this and I'm really glad that you're talking to me about her today.

0:58Yeah thank you I'm so excited to come on and be able to speak about a character that I've loved for so long and connected with so instantly so uh yeah i'm stoked tell me why you picked phoebe um well i like most millennials i got into friends in the 90s um i remember the first ever episode i saw was the one with the princess leia fantasy and there was a kitchen scene um the at the top of the episode where monica was uh basically in a pretty bad place because her and richard had just split up and she was taking the whole thing really hard and Phoebe was commenting on how she got a phone call during the night and she heard a loud squeaking sound and she thought it was from a mouse or a possum and then she realised it was Monica but then she made a gag about I wondered how would a mouse or a possum get the money to make the phone call and at the age of 10 I remember thinking to myself well she's not like the other ones and I instantly identified with her and every time Phoebe was on screen, I was obsessed.

2:10So consequently, throughout the years, Christmases and birthdays, I used to get the VHS tapes of Friends and the episodes that I would always rewind and re-watch the most typically were the Phoebe-centric episodes because I thought that a lot of Friends is light and silly, a lot of which Phoebe is, but I also think that Phoebe is the beaten heart of the group and her episodes are very emotional and are often the ones that, you know, get a crying response out here. I know, they really do. Like we've been, it's to set the scene for the listeners, it's a very rainy Sunday in October and we've just been inside with the fire on, eating a curry and watching a load of friends and watching obviously the very phoebe centric friends and you're right they do i mean almost everything gets a crying response out of me these days i think that's just like hormonal shifts with age but i think there's something it's so interesting because of this journey that we all have with friends everyone of our age of like it's this kind of show that raised us and it's like everything that we come to that we wanted out of adult life often comes from either sex in the city or a friend like some combination of like some big city life where like your friends are your family and you have this really really tight relationship with them and like these are the kinds of parties you have and this is the kind of jobs you go after and like it's so much of the stencil of life comes from sitcom and comes from friends and but it's so funny like the way that changes because you know you watch friends as a kid as you said like like phoebe has these totally like off the wall jokes that are like so childlike and innocent but then the older you get and like you always know when you're young that she like oh her mom killed herself and all the you know she lived in a car for a while and she lived on the streets for a while and you just take this as part of like oh somebody with a colorful backstory and then the more you live in the world and experience people who like maybe have gone through like the thing is like yes phoebe's backstory is sort of tragic and bizarre but like actually the longer that you live in the world the more you actually do meet people whose backstory is artagogic and bizarre and you actually do meet people who deal with that tragedy and that bizarreness by being like listen you know this is something happened to me and it's not a big deal to me and I'm just sort of moving past it and I'm I'm greeting the world with like a sunniness and a vibrancy because I don't let things get me down because if I were to live in either my trauma or my sadness I wouldn't get out of bed so now I'm just like I've built a coping mechanism that kind of is my whole persona you know and it's actually it's not sad that I'm coping because I'm thriving you know 100 % and I think what you said I really relate to that in that there's there's a couple of aspects of Phoebe that I identified with then and I've come to identify with in a different way as I've gotten older and part of that is that you know like many other listeners I'm sure had what could be described as a turbulent upbringing a lot of uncertainty moving around unconventional situations and when I was very young and started watching Friends I identified with the cookie side of Phoebe and then you know that that sort of unconventional troubled past as I started to get older move into my teen years and then as I started to to move into young adulthood that sense of Phoebe being the other in the friendship group I started to you know identify with in terms of my queerness and I think that's where Phoebe's always been a bit of a lighthouse for me in terms of like the central cast she's always the one where her episodes were the ones that I gravitated towards because they felt the most like me.

6:25You know, Friends for a kid growing up in the 90s was worlds away from anything that we knew. You know, it was set in New York. You know, it was American. It was, you know, these beautiful people with film star looks. And then you've got Phoebe, who is just, you know, completely unfiltered in her warminess um but in a way that's so earnest and it didn't feel like I'm I'm the cookie one because that's the character that I've created for myself it's because that is how life has shaped her because she had either one of two ways that she could go she could be you know this uh being of you know spirituality and silliness and childlike wonder or she could be like her sister Ursula who is um a bit of a cunt yeah like Ursula's a psycho I'm pretty sure we brought that up on this mini series already but like it it the the older you get again it's like the things that you found and maybe this is also um the kind of millennial sickness I have this kind of theory um you know when you do something for long enough and you become your own worst critic in a certain sense and I've been doing this podcast for seven years and so I have already built I've already written every one star review in my own head like there's no there's no worse review that somebody could leave for me and sometimes I think when I'm writing myself those one star reviews in my own head that like sometimes I think millennials have this sickness where we love to re-watch Gilmore Girls or Friends or Sex and City or Samson's or whatever and then like I do on the show all the time we pile all this meaning on top of it and I think I'm like is that Caroline is that just you doing your own version of like sunk cost fallacy of being like oh well I've spent so much time on it so therefore I have to convince myself it's meaningful but like so sometimes I'm like oh god am I just like forcing biblical meaning onto things that were created in quite a shallow way but then when you look at stuff where you're like no like yeah I know it's funny that Ursula is a psychopath and she like is really mean to Phoebe but like I look back on it and I'm like no there are real families who are like this there are real families who struggled with really terrible things and then like one person chooses the darkness and one person chooses the light like I I've seen those families happen I've seen those people who were like get pulled into the negativity and therefore their outlook is like incredibly sarcastic and brittle which is exactly how Ursula is I mean Ursula's a fucking nutcase and she like steals Phoebe's identity to make porn and everything and it's so funny but she's also I mean the thing I find heartbreaking when you see Phoebe and Ursula interact is that it's always Phoebe coming to Ursula with this new fact she found out about their family whether it's that like their dad is still alive or their mom isn't that they you know she found her birth mom or whatever it's always Ursula being like oh yeah I know I knew that who cares and like I know of so many people who have that relationship with their siblings where it's like your sibling won't let you be the person to tell you anything because like oh yeah I knew that forever I knew that for years kind of thing you know yeah absolutely I mean look I am I'm fortunate enough to have a great relationship with all my siblings but um my uh sister who's a year apart from me we experienced a lot of the same things growing up together um and our lives took very different trajectories we're very different personalities and um we've very much been shaped by our experience in ways that have made us worlds apart despite how fond of each other or how much we love each other um and have very different ways of dealing with things and i think that us as the viewer like we're inclined to be on Phoebe's side because Phoebe is this this beacon of like childlike wonder and love and light and silliness and then it's you know we're getting that sort of one-sided view of you know Ursula is just working as an adversary Phoebe anytime we see her I mean despite you know having the best porn name of all time Buffy the vampire layer it's played for last but it's so incredibly fucked up that her sister assumes her twin sister assumes her name as her porn alias like whatever happened to your mother's maiden name in the first pet you ever owned you know but uh yeah i i think in terms of my uh relationship with phoebe as well I do think that she's somebody that always wears her heart on her sleeve And that's very much informed and shaped the relationship she has with the other friends But she's also somebody that despite all of the things that happened to her in childhood and adulthood She never lives with any sense of regret She never has any sense of feeling defeated or, you know, as if she's owed anything she just continues to move on in whatever way she can and create the experiences that she never had to experience before and that's something again I relate with in another an episode that you know means a lot to me in in terms of you know the the Phoebe universe is the episode where she where Ross teaches her to ride a bike because she she'd never had a bike before and she she She plays it in a very sweet way where she had the box that the bike came in and her stepfather used to just drag her around the garden.

12:10And that comes off as a happy memory. And rather than let that hold her back and be a thing of great trauma, she's just like, this is what it is. And now I'm going to learn to ride a bike. And she has the bike she wanted as a child with the tassels and the little basket. And I just think she's so lovely and so inspirational. in a way where when I watch Friends, I seldom find myself watch a sitcom and think, God, you know, be more Jerry Seinfeld. Don't be more Jerry Seinfeld. Absolutely not. But I absolutely watch Friends and think, man, be more Phoebe Buffay. I know. I think that's so much now.

12:57And I think I've said this elsewhere in the series, but like so much now like it's interesting when I first watched the show I so gravitated towards what I thought of as being the more adult and cosmopolitan characters like which was Rachel and Chandler like I loved Rachel for how like stylish and funny and sexy she was and I loved Chandler for how like quick and sharp he was and now much more as I get older I am I sort of I'm less focused on those subplots and more focused on the Joey and Phoebe subplots because they're just sort of like moving through the world in like very unconventional way that's like just very joyful and like I I actually want to I want to ape that behavior much more than I want to ape like Chandler's behavior I know that's a silly thing to say but like something I've been thinking a lot while I've been re-watching all these episodes is that like I remember being a kid and being like oh my god if I could just have a friend or a boyfriend like Chandler that would be the dream and now I watch it and like like oh of course this is why they're all annoyed by you you're annoying like just answer a question in a normal way stop being like sarcastic and weird like this is a this is a terrible energy to be around oh absolutely it plays well as a sitcom but it's an awful energy to be around if if Friends was created in 2025 Chandler's bioline would be that he's an energy vampire oh my god he's such an energy vampire because you're trying to have a conversation with the guy and he's just giving you a quip and you're like my god just answer the fucking question what time is the table booked for but yeah what you were saying about the relationship between Phoebe and Joey specifically that's a really interesting one I'd love to know where the creators what the secret sauce was I'm kind of imagining the equivalent of a scientist in a lab creating a formula like how did that come about where that was the relationship that kind of rose to the top in terms of the strongest friendships.

14:59Because we're always told that Joanne Chandler are best friends, Monica and Rachel are best friends. But the two friends that you see actually most committed to each other on an emotional level. But also on a time spent level. Absolutely. And there's so much nuance in their relationship. They have in-jokes. you know they have um conversations away from the group they have plans you know that that's one of my favorite bits ever it's like me and joey have dinner and they're like oh really like yeah we once a month we have dinner to discuss the rest of you which again is just so how friends are absolutely and i'd love to know how that came about was that a case of there was an actual chemistry between lisa kudrow and matt leblanc or was it that they looked at the two characters and said these are two people that would work well together or was it that they just gradually gravitated towards each other and the creator said, this seems right, we're going to keep going with this.

16:02Whatever the method was that got us to that point, I'm so grateful for it because it really is such a wholesome relationship. And I mean, obviously, Phoebe, her story is such that she grew up very much without family yeah why don't you take us from the start with the with phoebe and uh give me like if you if you dare can you give me an entire history of phoebe buffet's life i'm gonna try okay that's why you brought me here so phoebe was born i want to say upstate to hippie parents to lily and frank buffet who as we are to understand are were teen parents they were like right out of high school yes they were like high school sweethearts and at some point along the way frank left one day never came back and left lily with um her twins phoebe and ursula lily was suffering from pretty extreme depression and then came to as we now know she put her head in the oven um is that literally how she healed herself yes uh yeah she put her head in the oven which uh you know they did it before the virgin suicides and but do you think that's that was specifically to try and invoke like a sylvia plath thing i don't know i i mean does friends run that deep i mean it's a pretty it's a pretty specific thing to invoke right yeah i mean i think the imagery of it in the 90s they probably just thought this is a funny way to off this woman.

17:41Right, like, sorry, I'll let you continue in a second, but like, it's really interesting to choose that. And maybe it's because, I mean, we always talk about the 90s as being this kind of time where humour was a little bit crueler and it was broader and sharper in terms of like, it really didn't mind hurting people the way people kind of take a second sort of pause when they do that now. But like, I think invoking a famous female suicide like that is most probably quite intentional. And I think probably back then, we were treating Sylvia Platt's suicide like it was something kind of funny. It was a bit like, you know, how people used to say like, oh, Marilyn Monroe died in the nude or whatever.

18:17You know, it's like people just sort of took that kind of thing very lightly back then in a way that we wouldn't now. For sure. I mean, how this first came about was there was a Thanksgiving episode where for one reason or another, all six of the friends were, well, five of the six of the friends weren't able to celebrate thanksgiving as they'd initially planned so rachel was supposed to go on a skiing trip to vale and um joey ended up becoming the vd guy so his family didn't want to see him so everybody had a reason for hearing thanksgiving because they they couldn't celebrate or because something had happened to them previously and the gag with phoebe was that her mom died around thanksgiving and she'd put her head in the oven.

19:05Right, right. But subsequently, she was very young, ended up on the streets living out of a car and was kind of shaped by the streets, became quite scrappy. She befriended people in the streets and all we know of that time is what's kind of drip-fed to us throughout the seasons and it's usually, you know, backed by some kind of gag that shaped her streets experience, whether it was the time that she mugged Ross or, you know, she learned French behind a dumpster. Bonjour. And then when we meet her in season one, she's kind of fully formed. She's ditzy. She's new age. She's cleansing people's auras.

19:47Absolutely. She's all into past lives. And she's a massage therapist and she's a former roommate of Monica's. And that's how we come to know her. But at this point, she's fully formed in her ideals. and her way of being. But throughout the series, we continue to have the pieces of her childhood and her story stitched together. And that comes in the form of her meeting additional family members, whether it's her brother, Frank Jr. or... Yeah, let's talk about, like, specifically about Frank Jr. for a while, because I loved Giovanni Rizvici as Frank Jr. He's great in that. Did you know he was in another episode previously?

20:29yes he like dropped a condom in her uh car case or something right yeah which in my head canon i'm like that's frank it's not like i like think that too yeah yeah i uh yeah so so remind me how exactly frank is related to her is it like her well he's frank jr so he's her father's son so what happens is uh one christmas ross somebody gets a frame for somebody for christmas i think that Ross gets a frame for his mother and Phoebe notices the guy on the frame and thinks that it's her father. And this is another one of the fucked up aspects of Phoebe's childhood. She spends all of her upbringing thinking that her father is this one particular guy.

21:14But it turns out that he's actually basically... A stock model. A stock model that's largely... His body of work is... Graduation. In the frames of pictures. Another graduation. Another graduation. Another graduation. That's so like an audio thing in my head. That's like another graduation. Another graduation. So she speaks to her grandmother. And, you know, the only appearance that we see from her grandmother. And her grandmother tells her that her father lives upstate. He's a pharmacist. So Phoebe and Chandler and Joey head upstate to meet Frank Jr. and Phoebe essentially bottles it at the time but in a really nice conversation with Joanne Chandler very supportive, very kind It's so lovely because it's like the boys are supposed to be going she's taking them Christmas shopping which is weird because like why would you get in a car to do that?

22:12I guess maybe the plan was to go to like an outlet mall somewhere on the way upstate or on the way back or something and then it's like it's too late for that and they're in the back of this car in the freezing cold and they just fall asleep and like it's just so again I know it's a funny silly show but there's something really lovely about like the two boys like putting their hands through the kind of the partition the little hole where you're supposed to pay someone and like just like holding their friend's hand and being like it's okay like and they literally say to her like today was a big step for you yeah you you made it to the driveway you know you might make it to the front door the next day and it's it's very sweet so that's where we're introduced to Frank Buffet as being a living presence still and towards the end of the season Phoebe decides to head back and meet him and finds out that he has another family and he's essentially done the exact same to them but in his place is her brother Frank Jr and you know he's equally as cookie as her but in a completely different way.

23:23He's so well observed though like I was talking to somebody the other day and was like she was like every time I think about me and my brother's relationship I feel better about it because of Giovanni Rapisi. She's just like I just sit up as to him while he talks to me about melting stuff I honestly don't know how you would characterize him because he's very normal in the most insane way. It's so true He's such a normal, like, into skateboarding and just sort of like, not even like into skateboarding, into kind of nothing, just sort of like little worm living on a fucking beach, just slugging out.

24:00You know, he's like so a nothing guy, but also every guy you ever went to school with. Absolutely. And his emotional scale is quite bizarre in that he's either very muted or extremely heightened in a way that's quite erratic. Did you have Anirbisi? Why do I know his name as well as I do? Like, did he do, what was the other big things he was in? I can't remember. I know that he was in... He's such a specific presence. I remember him from Gone in 60 Seconds, but that was because I problematically stand Angelina Jolie's white girl dreads in 2001. So let's not talk about that. You know what? We've got bigger fish to fry right now.

24:42Bigger fish to fry. I think you can just find her dreads aesthetically pleasing and you can still go to heaven maybe i don't know it was that fucking freestyler video man that's that's what did it for me but um so frank jr she meets him he's completely elated to have a sister when they decide to keep in contact and they start to build a really really nice relationship and um then at some point uh we're introduced to alice who is his a former teacher and played amazingly by deborah joe rup and who is um the mother from that 70s show yes kitty kitty and they just sort of mack on each other make out all the time but again they have this really beautiful relationship and you can see that with frank he's getting something from alice that he never got from his home life as well and it's a really rich deep love so it's interesting in that context as well it's it is well observed that like yeah he's he's with this kind of mother figure and he's trying to find this kind of replacement family in his romantic life and like it it does like scam really bizarrely and like phoebe is immediately worried about it but also she has done the same thing with her friends that like joey is this kind of like older brother almost father figure to her sometimes and that's how she sort of sees him and And, like, it is just sort of how people build their lives, you know?

26:03Yeah, I feel like Phoebe is to Frank what Joey is to Phoebe, you know? Oh! Really nice. Well, the thing is, Joey has seven sisters. So she sought him out because she knew that he knows how to be a brother. Yeah. And that's what she needed. And she met Frank and she knew straight away he needed a big sister. Oh. and that's why, you know, committing the ultimate act of love, she became a surrogate for their kids, and God, I really struggle with those episodes, particularly the one where she gives birth, just because they are so moving, and a lot of it is played for laughs again, in terms of, I'm having my brother's babies.

26:46I mean, the entire show is played for laughs, that is the function of the show, is to be played for laughs. I need to stop saying played for laughs. Yeah, I think it's a given, it's being played for laughs, and we're just the ones being like, like weird and like emotional and moody about it yeah it's it's not that deep ryan but it is that deep ryan that's why we're here yeah i mean that that that's where you know phoebe really gets to me because you know she will be so out there there will be a lot of buffoonery and ridiculousness but then we'll come to a scene like her saying goodbye to the triplets in the hospital and the way that Lisa Kudrow, not just in Friends but as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback or in Romy and Michelle, the way that she's able to create cartoonish characters and then put so much humanity behind them is unbelievable yeah I love that woman three of the comeback oh my god when season three of the comeback comes around oh my god but no you're so right like with like valerie cherish there's the thing about again to go back to the phrase played for laughs but like i remember uh when the comeback came out so the comeback if people know is her other show and um she plays a kind of failing actress on a reality tv program and there's been two seasons over you know 15 years and it's going to be a third soon and we love it um and valerie cherish is that character and valerie cherish is like vain and insipid and like deluded and has a sort of a totally outsized idea of her own talent and her own fame and like for in many ways should be kind of a repulsive anti-hero because of how hungry she is for validation and like how that hungriness is very like oh god get her away and everybody around Valerie is apart from her closest and best are like oh get this lady away she's kind of sickening but there's also this like unbelievable humanity to her like I cry more at that show than I cry at any other show just because you can just see this kind of raw hurt child underneath this kind of aging starlet who just wants to have her best days back again and I think it's really affecting absolutely i'll i'll never forget when we lived together and uh well when when i first moved to london and season two of the comeback came out and we just found ourselves one night in my bed streaming it when when it just became available and the two of us inconsolable in bed when valerie rushes to mickey's bedside during the emmys red you came oh my god guys you have You have to watch the comeback.

29:33However many of you, a proportion of sentimental garbage listeners have seen the comeback is not enough. There needs to be more of you. All of you have to watch the comeback. I mean, I don't think it's a hot take anymore, but I don't look at Lisa Kudrow and think immediately Phoebe Buffay because she was so impactful as Valerie Cherish and it's so layered as a performance. Go watch the comeback. Go watch the comeback. That's not why we're here. Yeah, exactly. but we are here to talk about like this tremendous gift that lisa kudrow has and that for some reason is like never been this gift that's been tapped into by like um movie directors do you know i mean like she was in a lot of movies in the 90s but she's not seen as like i think that sort of thing that she's able to do as you say of creating these like kooky characters who have this deep well of pain inside of them that they're trying really hard to like manage is like such a gift that like no other actress has in the same way and like I just wish that there was like a big I don't know a big August Osage County moment for Lisa Kudrow you know for sure I mean I think she's a really strong you know ensemble actor she works really well in in an ensemble cast as as a character her actor um even her performance in something like easy a she she's the the straight man but a lot of the emotional depth in that movie comes from her performance as an adulterous wife to to thomas hayden church and um i guess in in such a sort of heteronormative show like friends everybody is the straight man at least for the first few seasons until their characters start to become more sort of magnified and Phoebe is the cream that rises to the crop in terms of that zany character that is able to Lisa Kudrow is able to completely colour outside the lines and I've heard her speak in interviews about how she evolved the character of Phoebe and she said that it was actually really easy to play with her and build on her because she's so completely unlike her as a person.

31:58But she just knew that whatever she did with Phoebe, she knew that Phoebe deserved good things. So she was always a complete champion for the character and it makes it really hard to imagine anybody else play her. I mean, when you think about in terms of people that were up in the process for casting for Phoebe, you've got the likes of famously Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen DeGeneres was supposed to be Phoebe. Yeah, she was shortlisted along with Jane Lynch and Kathy Griffin. All extremely talented people. I mean, whatever you think of Ellen now, undoubtedly very talented and they would have all brought something you know particular to to that role but i just can't imagine any of them and any of their creative brilliance being able to hold a torch to to what lisa kudrow's done with phoebe i mean i can't imagine anybody could make me love her more than lisa kudrow has so i mean should we talk about the relationship that phoebe has to the other friends because obviously she started living with with monica and monica is a control freak that's kind of the reason why phoebe moved out yeah and the the two of them are essentially oil and water in terms of their personality types but there's something about the two of them that really works and and again the the relationship of of the three girls um was so close off screen that it built this bond between them that started to really translate on screen so i wonder how much that informed the relationships between the characters and made the relationship between say phoebe and monica or or phoebe and rachel closer yeah it's interesting because like you there's never really a getting to know you portion is there right because like when you think about the friends episode one is about Rachel leaving her wedding and coming to just crash with Monica and then she becomes part of this gang like she already knows Ross she already knows Monica she doesn't know Joey and she doesn't know Phoebe she does know Chandler and like there's kind of a weird flirty moment with her and Joey where she's like oh hello kind of thing they did do that one flashback episode and all that we got from that was that she shifted Ross when he found out that Carol was a lesbian and then he banged his head off of a lamp and they kind of got stunted into reality.

34:39Do you regard those flashback episodes as being canon though? I don't know. I just kind of take them at face value. But the only thing about the flashback episodes that they do is that's the only one that's actually ever featured Phoebe because all of the other flashbacks go back to the 80s. Where it's everybody but Phoebe and Joey. very interesting yeah so that's that's the only that's the only experience we get of like you know monica and phoebe as housemates for example um and and that's where you get to see that you know there's there's something that holds the two of them together you know pre-rachel pre another girl being in the group yeah um there's obviously like this this bond between them and i think that is that there's a real sort of big sister little sister relationship between monica and Phoebe which Monica kind of has with Rachel as well it's interesting isn't it because obviously in any big group of friends there are like sub dynamics within that and that's you know true true of real friends true in the show friends but like there's this I always find the girl centric episodes where there's like something happening between the three of them or like you know Rachel and Monica arguing over who gets to go out with Jean-Claude Van Damme or whatever or like there's like some kind of antics or hijinks or whatever with the girls it's always like Phoebe is always the like okay well I'll say what happens next and like one scene I love is when like it's Monica's wedding and she first of all Phoebe sort of like takes the hit for Rachel because Rachel isn't ready to like say that she's pregnant yet oh so nice and then she keeps the pregnancy test result from Rachel and she says you know you're not pregnant and then Rachel starts crying and she goes no I just wanted you to know how you feel about it you are pregnant and it's like it's just so lovely and it's just like it's interesting because the actress Lisa Kudrow is a couple of years older than uh Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston but also the character is older because she's experienced more than the other two of them have and so she's like often even though she's the kooky character she's rarely the character who's embroiled in like drama or jealousies or pettiness She's just like, okay, here's what we're going to do.

36:55We're going to do this and then we're going to do this kind of thing. Yeah. Well, she does often act as referee in those situations as well or kind of the go-between. She did it in the, for example, when Monica and Rachel were fighting over Jean-Claude Van Damme and pouring fucking pasta sauce in each other's bags. It was so good. I can see that fucking pasta sauce tipping moment so clearly. A very iconic scene. Ripping each other's sweaters. Oh my God, that's so just, that image is just in there for me. I could probably not remember images from my own wedding, but I can remember that pastasol is going into the bag.

37:32Yeah, absolutely. And then there was the episode, of course, where Phoebe is the catalyst for exposing Monica and Chandler's relationship. Oh yeah. Where she has the dance with Chandler, where she's popping buttons and suggesting him. that's another outfit that I can see so clearly her kind of midnight blue top of the buttons it's like a velvety number yeah but uh yeah so she has this really good way of leading the charge with her friends but also you know putting them in time out when she needs to as well and I think that there's no one that she does that more with than Ross so good Ross is very type A you know Phoebe is very very type B I don't really know what type b means to be honest but right ross is type a and phoebe's whatever else yeah he's no type of thing it's interesting actually you obviously haven't heard this episode because it's not yet but we just did an episode with imogen west knights about uh her perspective as a ross apologist um you're a ross denier i'm not a ross denier i just think that he fucking sucks way more than he doesn't but so I I sort of put our sort of charges against Ross as a people to her and one of the charges I had was that he is frequently mean to Phoebe and she defended him and I would like you to fight for Phoebe's side well I think that Ross is well intentioned at times I mean he was the one who bought her a bike and he wanted to you know see her enjoy the bike but ross phoebe colors outside the lines ross colors very much inside them and i think that phoebe is somebody who's so authentically herself in every way shape and form and i think that for her she just can't be on a level with somebody or interact with somebody so closely if they're not being themselves and i think that with ross she she feels that i I mean, there was that example of the episode.

39:44It's the episode where Mr. Heckles dies and Phoebe is basically questioning the idea of evolution. And Ross is completely perplexed and rightly so. Because he's a paleontologist. You do know that industry's careers, my career, is built around this idea. Yeah, and then Phoebe basically in a record scratch moment, you know, takes him to task and says, are you really so close-minded that you can't believe that there's the slightest chance that an idea outside of your belief system could possibly exist? And Ross is like, yeah, I guess maybe so. And she's like, oh my God, I can't believe you folded.

40:33she says you know at least before i disagreed with you but i respected you and ross is gag mama how are you going to go to work on monday how are you going to face your friends how are you going to face yourself bodied ross was dog walked and bodied so yeah i love that i love when she's a true agent of chaos but it's so funny back to the biography and various family members of phoebe because ironically it's like um even though she is this uh creature who's on the wind and sort of without family ties and orphaned and all that we actually do get a lot of various kooky phoebe family members we get brother as we said um we haven't spoken about her birth mother yet phoebe abbott but we also get her grandmother who is a cab driver which i love and like you for some reason you pointed out when we were watching it earlier on because we watched the episode where she tells her she tells phoebe that um her dad is not a stock model he's a man who lives up to date um and you were like that's the only time we ever see phoebe's grandmother but weirdly in my head i'm like oh no surely we see her all the time because she's such a ingrained idea in my head that phoebe's got this grandmother who's a cab driver and then in my head i'm like phoebe's uh grandmother is like fran liebovitz because

41:59she's often spoke of but where did she come from is she Lily's mother she's Lily's mother but she's often spoke of in the same way that the ugly naked guys often spoke of and never seen but in this one occasion and usually when they speak about Phoebe's grandmother it's some kind of quip attached to it Phoebe didn't sleep because her grandmother was up all night with her new boyfriend and the both of them are hard of hearing and we're just both reassuring each other a lot but the the one time that we do see her even though she's this source of stability for phoebe that in itself is quite fucked up because she's lying to phoebe you know she's she's saying that she's perpetuating the lie about phoebe's dad being the frame guy um because her mother yeah wanted her to um to to keep up the line after she died it was harder to lie to her you know not impossible but still hard and uh it's like sure yeah we get that but then two seconds later phoebe leaves the flat and says bye grandpa to a frame of albert einstein so the grandmother's a liar as well and in the cab telling lies also i know this is this is like not a good point to bring up but like where was the grandmother when she was on the streets what point did the grandmother intervene i did think of that too um so i i don't know if she was you know yeah driving cabs on the west coast or something i don't know call it a plot hole but yeah i would love to see that i'm sure there's a really good explanation because i actually do believe even though that so much of um phoebe's backstory does feel like they randomly just like oh and then they've done the streets and all it feels for the first couple of seasons that they're just kind of drawing traumatic events out of a hat i do really believe that as the series went on as like the actors became bonded to the characters and as the character as the cast became bonded to the crew that like they all felt very careful about what it was they were creating because as we as the series moves on there's like so many moments of true sincerity of like phoebe finding happiness and phoebe sort of referring to the fact that like she didn't have the regular things that other people had and how she tries to get them and like you can tell the way lisa kudra plays it the way it's framed the way it's shot the way the cameras stay will stay on her a beat longer that they're like we know this is a funny show and we'll get back to the funniest in just one second but we really care about this character and we want you to care about her too well over the 10 years of friends I think that Phoebe is the only character that is seen to be on a constant journey of healing you know there's this journey that Rachel goes through where she goes from being you know the Long Island princess to you know independent career woman she transitions into that role by third season but Phoebe is still you know plugging the holes in her heart throughout all 10 seasons always looking for family and always looking to heal relationships with family you know she she found her her chosen family and the five friends but she she knows that there's family out there she knows that there's more that she wants whether that's her relationship with David or Mike and I'm sure we'll talk about her relationships but with men but in terms of you know understanding what she was missing in life going up you can actively see her through the entire lifespan of the series looking to to plug those gaps and I think that's a really sort of beautiful branch in in the friends tree and I guess that's part of why I wanted to speak about Phoebe today because I just think it's so interesting that we're constantly following her journey in a way that you know I we only see Joey's parents once in the entire series Whenever we see Rachel's family, it's always, you know, the same kind of beat that we're hitting in terms of her parents are just bonkers.

46:10The Gellas are secondary characters. Yeah, they very much are. Yeah. Live, you know, as frequently in the universe as Gunther does, you know. but with Phoebe you know we're always adding to that whether it is Frank Jr or it is Phoebe Abbott you're right there's like the family that we do see is very well drawn but it's very stable it's like this is what the Gellers are always like this is what Rachel's parents are always like but you're right with Phoebe it is a continuing story that we're building on all the time that like it will yeah it never gets quite finished I think what's also very nice as well Is that the first member of Phoebe's family That we're introduced to is Ursula And she does work as that sort of antagonist to Phoebe Despite Phoebe's pushing back against that Throughout the series But every single person that we meet That comes into our life after that Is happy to see Phoebe And wants her to be part of their world And that's where Frank and Phoebe Abbott Everybody wants to make a space for Phoebe in their life and have her make a space in theirs and I think that's really nice as well while we didn't get to see Terry Garr play Phoebe Abbott after a couple of episodes you can still assume that they still spend time with each other because the note that we left that relationship on was a good one where they wanted to move forward I don't think so Phoebe that was my puppy I think she understood I mean you're not going to lose a daughter over that are you?

47:54It was a cute puppy but That was my puppy Just so often Just imagine if you were in that situation She loved giving things to Frank Jr Dogs, her womb That's such a lovely point that like yeah Ursula rejects her again and again but every new person she meets is like they do want to make a space for her It is lovely Let's talk about Phoebe and Men then What do we have? I mean, the first... She's kind of the Samantha of the show, right? Like, I think that's another parallel that you get with Joey and Phoebe a lot, is that they both sleep around a lot. And I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that we know that Rachel and Ross are endgame, and we know that Chandler and Monica are endgame, and we spend a lot of the series kind of, you know, passing that ball around.

48:41And so the single New Yorkers are sort of perpetually Joey and Phoebe. so we see them with kind of temporary boyfriends and girlfriends a lot. And Phoebe and Joey are almost the outsiders of the group because, again, they weren't in the Long Island scenes and they didn't, you know, grow up with each other. They came into the group, you know, through living arrangements in their 20s. And you know that Phoebe was actually supposed to be a secondary character, herself and Chandler, when they first brought the show about it? it was supposed to be centred around Monica, Ross, Rachel and Joey. Joey was supposed to be a central character because he was the sexy one.

49:24Yes, and the main romance that they were building towards was going to be Monica and Joey, which is why they referred to it in the flashback episode. That's crazy. Yeah, where Joey comes to view the gaff and Monica's giving them the how-ya. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. Interesting. Imagine. Imagine. So, yeah, Phoebe does, she's a gal about town and it's never played in a Samantha-like way. It's just, here's somebody else that Phoebe's dating. But it's almost like the facts of Samantha, but played to a different tune or something. Because it's like, she's very much like, oh yes, well I'm very sexual. And like, yeah, like I love, she's very kind of just shamelessly into her body and knows that she's sexy kind of thing.

50:09In a similar way to what Kim and the Child's doing, just with a different instrument, you know? It's like the facts of Samantha, but with the whimsy of a Charlotte. Yeah. And the first guy that I remember her being with was Roger, who was the shrink. And... Oh, my God. I hate that guy. These big cups, they might as well have nipples on them. I always think about that. Every time I have a big cup, I think, might as well have a nipple on it. On a side note, that's the guy that directed the David Beckham documentary. And that always blows my mind. oh my god the guy who's also in succession yeah Fisher Stevens that's him really what a life he's had get you a guy that can do both but the first significant love we meet of Phoebe's is David the Scientist played by Hank Azaria yeah they fall very hard very fast and very deep for what is one episode what?

51:08yeah And he's referred to throughout the series as well. David comes into the show a couple of times over the years, but for the most part, he's on some kind of research. In Minsk? Work. The only reason I know about Minsk is because of David. The only reason anybody born between 1980 and 1995 knows about Minsk is because of Friends. Right. And it's also, it's such a beautiful meet-cute because it's like she's playing the guitar and he's arguing with his friend and talking and she's like, hello, do you want to share or whatever we're saying? And he says like, I was just arguing about whether you're the most beautiful girl in the world or not because he thinks it's Daryl Hannah and Splash but I think it's you.

51:54I mean, it's very sweet. It's so beautiful. Imagine if that was how you met your boyfriend. Of course she never got over him. Absolutely, but he did fuck off. He did fuck off. And he rarely visited. And I know that they tried to plug it with, you know, many various reasons. But man, if you love her, like, come back and visit. You're a scientist. You're making money. Get in a plane. Go to New York. Right. And then he does come back when she's about to get serious with Mike. Mike. Right. Towards the end. But like, for us to remember the, like, significance of David by that point, which must be series eight or nine like that is crazy amount of legacy for a one one episode character to have yeah well he does come back again and he leaves again and that's where i'm not sold on david because for somebody that carries as much trauma and abandonment issues as phoebe how are you going to be the greatest love of our life and then go back to minsk give this girl some consistency in our life david shitter get off the pot man shitter get off the pot man so right that's that's where mike came in and mike is played by paul rudd and he looked exactly as he does now because he's a vampire and mike is a musician from the upper east side he's from a very wealthy family and he basically meets phoebe because joey lies to phoebe about um setting her up with a guy called Mike but then realises that he has to actually set her up with a guy called Mike so walks into Central Park, shouts out the name Mike and he's found his Mike and I just, I think the relationship between Phoebe and Mike is just absolutely perfect because he completely takes Phoebe at face value and loves every crazy thing about her and that's the happy ending that we wanted for Phoebe.

53:50Crab bag. oh my god the princess consuela banana hammock episode you know the the later seasons of friends i don't know how anybody else feels about it but i don't think it's a hot take to say that after season eight it kind of went off the deep end the i think off the deep end is strong i think like it's still funny and everything it's just that like the show is about that period of your twenties where your friends are not just your family they're your whole life do you know what I mean and like that phase of your life can generally last for like 10-15 years between sort of 20 to 35 36 or whatever and like then other things just start taking precedent whether it's like uh working in different countries whether it's having children whether it's looking after parents whatever it is other things just take over which means that you don't have this bottomless amount of time to like hang out and so I think once they started getting older and once the kind of the time pressures of life started bearing down on them which is that like well how are we going to wrap this up and which one of them are going to have kids and blah blah it just it the show just very naturally wasn't about that anymore and therefore became less compelling.

55:04Yeah I totally get where you're coming from but with Friends where I started to have trouble with it was that it felt that it ran out of steam in in later seasons it got too big and and the snake started to eat itself the characters started to become caricatures of themselves monica didn't just like to clean that bitch really liked to fucking clean you know chandler wasn't just sarcastic you know you couldn't have a conversation with him because he was an absolute nightmare joey didn't just like pizza he wanted two pizzas and a wank you know it was it was all a bit too much um and that's where you know i'll watch an episode of friends if it comes on um comedy central if if it's season two i'll watch three or four episodes if it's season nine i'll watch an episode you know like my go-to comfort seasons are one to three and i'm feeling particularly freaky i'll go into season six but after that i just start to taper off because i don't know what it is its shine starts to dull a little.

56:08And I definitely think from season eight on, you know, a completely different conversation, but we're living in a Friends in a post-9-11 world.

56:19Did you say post-9-11 world? That surely never came up on this podcast.

56:28I want to go back a minute to what is a very pre-9-11 story on Friends. and I think one we haven't talked about yet which is that Phoebe was married yes to Duncan the ice dancer the gay ice dancer that the gay no the straight eye is it the hang on she marries him because he needs a green card because he's Canadian right well he was gay but then he gets married to a woman and that's why he needs to divorce Phoebe yeah exactly but it was originally a green card marriage and like the joke of it being that like Phoebe was in love with him even when she thought he was gay or whatever and married him to help him out, but also just kind of to be married to him as well because she just loved him.

57:09And then him breaking to her that actually he's straight. And it's like this very funny, like these are the kind of like comedy reversals that Friends does so well. Like the way that Joey, when Phoebe's in the hospital giving birth to the twins, he's also giving birth to kidney stones. It's that thing of like Duncan having to come out to Phoebe as straight is like this upsetting, like, oh my God, like who else knows? And Phoebe's not mad because he's straight. You know, it's because he's not straight for her. She was mad at him for being straight and in love with somebody else. And that's just very painful.

57:40Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's one of the early signs as well of, you know, showing, you know, what a pure and good person that Phoebe is. You know, she had this relationship with Duncan where she loved him and wanted to keep him in her life, keep him in the country, you know, keep him in his profession and the most logical thing for her to do is say right let's get married and and I think as I said my relationship with Phoebe has evolved over the years um in terms of where I've aligned with her and I think that that's where you know I see her as being you know the the most queer example of a character obviously outside of Carol and Susan but in a very again heteronormative 90s show where now it's lambasted for not showing much diversity I think that Phoebe is probably why so many queer people gravitated towards that character in the 90s because she was other and she she did stay very true to her beliefs and she was unapologetically herself and you know she she did lean towards justice and the good and all of her beliefs which back then portrayed her as the zany one would probably be aligned with like liberal ideals now how you say that about her being kind of like a queer coded character and there's she has a lot in common with the backstories of many queer people which is that alienated from her family like um a huge amount of queer people you find are like have been alone by from a very young age and also this kind of um real investment and interest in like spiritualism and like new age stuff or whatever new age belief systems that really speak to somebody who's like like you often get this with people who have been on their own for a while they're really into astrology or they're really into getting their aura photograph taken or whatever because it's a thing of like often people who have rejected their original home or have been rejected by their original home it also means that the kind of the grand religious structure that raised them as well they've rejected that too and so they're they're always in this kind of searching mode of like well I don't really have that bedrock to cling on to and I wasn't really the values I was brought up with weren't necessarily good and so now I'm searching for something that I can frame my life around.

1:00:11And that's something that's very, feels very modern about that character. Totally. And I think that she's someone who always comes from a place of being non-judgmental. She, somebody that funnels her trauma, her pain into her art, you know, her music. We haven't even spoke about her music. Oh my God. You know, she famously had a night where she sung 12 songs about her mother's suicide and one song about a snowman. like can you remember the episode where she uh gets the the job in the library singing to children and she becomes the listen lady and the kids and she really relished the uh role of being like the listen lady and i think that's because she wanted people to tell it like it was when she was a kid so that she would be better prepared for for the harshness of the world because i mean again another episode that we see which we say that in that episode as well she's like people were nice to me when i was a kid i'm misremembering that like and then my mom killed herself yeah maybe i can't remember but that that probably makes sense because of course there's the episode that we have where phoebe is unaware that um a lot of well-known movies have sad endings because her mother shielded her from the trauma by saying the end and then would turn off like old jailer before the dog died yeah and she was like yeah she shielded me from the pain of the world and then she put her head in the oven yeah you know yeah and then there's also the thing of like it's kind of comes up a lot where she's like i hate pbs it's like it's so fun i only realized kind of how funny it is looking back where it's like you know phoebe is the kind of person who should love pbs because it's like this very noble american institution of publicly funded television she's like i hate them because and i don't want to give them money ever because like all the kids on sesame street they all and she wrote to them because she was having such a hard time and they never answered her letter and she was like fuck them forever they just sent her like pencils or something she was like i i didn't have paper but it's yeah it's just I I really again I just don't believe that any of these like details were they were added for fun but they were not added carelessly and it it really something I keep coming back to when like looking at the series again is really defining for myself the difference between comfort food and junk food yeah because I think a lot of what we have now in as a content to like watch at the end of a day's work or while we're boiling the kettle or whatever is like just fucking slop on our phones and there's something about friends that just feel so lovingly crafted that yeah it isn't intellectual yeah it's not going to challenge you yeah you have seen it a million times before but that comfort food element is like yeah I know this is like sort of good and big and soft but it's not gonna you know it's just gonna hold me for a second absolutely I mean friends is for everyone it's always there when you need it if you've you know travelled home from work and the chib's been a nightmare and you're soaking and I sound like I'm gonna break out into the theme song if you really do it hasn't been your day your week your month or even your year Maybe in your fucking year.

1:03:40But I remember when you and I lived together in South London when I first moved to London. And we lived together twice in our friendship. Yeah, yeah. So our second edition, and I come home and, you know, it could be you and Kat and Nick, our housemates, would be sat and there would be friends with repeats on and people would be eating, you know, like a Charlie Bigham's cottage pie or whatever we were eating when we were on 20 grand a year.

1:04:11and your evening just automatically slid in like a sort of place of comfort because you're on the couch, you're watching Friends, and you're safe. You're safe the same way that you were when you were watching it when you were 10. So right, yeah. I think that it often, you know, gets sort of downplayed now, but because it has been repeated to death, but Friends is always there when you need it, and people forget that it was the biggest thing in the world at one point. It was the biggest thing in culture. It literally rejuvenated or not even rejuvenated, but birthed the coffee shop. Aesthetic. Aesthetic, you know, lifestyle, landscape, whatever you want to call it.

1:04:55But, you know, people hanging out in coffee shops, you know, really wasn't a thing before Friends. Is that true? Yes. I thought like the 90s was all about like the Starbucksification and like, America drinks coffee now. Yeah, but Friends very much fed into that. Yeah, true. And I think that the part of what makes it so comforting is, you know, you're watching six people who just merge well together and do it so seamlessly, but that couldn't have been done without the loving craft of the actors and the writers to just really refine those characters. and I don't think that there's anybody, well, two people in the cast that I would credit for actively doing the work and, you know, building the universes of their characters the best are Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry.

1:05:52I think Matthew Perry, because he was very famously an improviser and sort of built on a lot of his lines. But based on, you know, other characters she's created and built, I can't help but think that Lisa Kudrow was instrumental in growing and evolving the character of Phoebe to be who she is and who we know and who we love. Yeah. And for that, I say thank you. For that, I say thank you. People who dismiss that character as being just like a silly side character, they do so at their own peril. Like, so much to enjoy. So much to enjoy. It's interesting at the moment because, like, as I've mentioned a couple of times already, I'm getting ready to make a TV show about, about people who are friends.

1:06:37Like I'm literally moving in five weeks to live in Dublin and to start making the Rachel incident, which is a, it's such a weird conversation to be having with you on this podcast about, because I wrote a book that was sort of inspired by the time that we lived together as friends. And now we're in the process of adapting that for television. and so I'm having this experience of like and it's it's it's one of those things where it's photocopies of photocopies of photocopies where it's like I wrote a character who was like you were the inspiration point for and like I've we've talked about that before in places um and then already when he became a character in a novel he was like a distillation he wasn't really like you he just was kind of like you and then writing the character again for for screen it's like then it's kind of another distillation right so so it's that but but all the same there are still things that are true of that character that are also true of you yeah but I mean that's what I was going to say how how do you in creating the Rachel incident as a show now take it from you know an idea in your head that was based on our lived experience of which you built a world from that and created a book into um you know creating a tv show and then taking those characters that you've created that have been inspired based on people you know and making them fully formed um with their own quips and traits that you don't just build in your own imagination but you're actually going to see on the screen but also hand over to an actor and hand over and not just hand over to an actor but hand over to a costume designer and a director and all these people who have to shape the character which is like why it's so it feels like a very strange full circle moment right now to be talking about Phoebe because she's somebody I have invoked over this process a lot when we've been at um script level when I've been like dealing with feedback on various aspects of the character of James who is the character who was inspired by you and like when people are asking about various points of dialogue or points about the character's backstory or whatever I was like the thing you have to remember about this character is like you you really want to put him in the universe of Phoebe Buffay in that like he's not going to be someone who like if he's telling you something about what happened to him in his past he's not going to put on this heavy voice and suddenly like say oh but oh I don't want to talk about that or I'll never mind or whatever it's like he'll completely tell you because he's sort of sunny about it and he like has dealt with it internally enough to not be able to not be like dragged into it.

1:09:18But at the same time, like he's light about it. He's effervescent about it. He's light on his feet. It's not troubling him. So it shouldn't trouble you either. But at the same time, he's not going to give you anything more than he's comfortable sharing. And it's like a really, there's kind of, when you're talking about characters who do that, Phoebe Buffay is actually the best touch point that you can have. I was like, no, no, no. This is not a character who's like living through trauma. This is Phoebe Buffay. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I think then that question kind of answers itself and that everybody that you've brought together for this project, they're doing it because of the love of the project and much like Lisa Kudrow, you know, they want the best for the characters.

1:10:04Yeah. And that's how it's going to manifest on the screen, which is why I cannot fucking wait to watch it. I'm so proud of you. You've got to visit Setman. It's going to be so trippy as fuck. I can't wait. I can't wait. I was showing Ryan the house today that we're going to shoot it in and it's near our old house and it's very weird. It's just very weird to, as you say, like watch the snake eat its own tail on this particular project. It's just very strange. Yeah, there'll be lots of happy tears over the coming months. There will be. And lots of nostalgia for our time that I wouldn't revisit except in my memories fondly.

1:10:36like rose I love you is there anything else you want to say about Phoebe Buffay while we're here I think she's great should we do some Phoebe Buffay lines that we like because I feel like we've been heavy and now I want us to say some of our funny lines my favourite is when she's like stroking Monica's hair and she's like oh Phoebs and Monica's like that's your name and she's like oh I thought that's what we called each other I love that I am inadvertently there's so it's not directly related to Phoebe but there was a time in the episode where someone at work stole Ross's sandwich and he was writing a note on the next sandwich so nobody would steal it and he's like hey she was like maybe I can give you a hand you know because I had to say some like pretty mean stuff in the streets and Ross was like oh what do you mean uh something like keep your mitts off my glove and chandler said when you see phoebe on the street see she's surrounded by the entire cast of annie i also love the episode where chandler kisses joey's sister when he's drunk and can't remember which sister and he's trying to find out and the friends are getting it mixed up and chandler says see you didn't know either what and phoebe says but we didn't kiss her

1:12:03I also love the episode I can't remember what the situation was but it was one of the later ones and it really fucking killed me where Phoebe gets very highly strong about she's arranged a dinner I think it's for her birthday everybody is super late in getting to the table and Ross and Rachel can't get a babysitter so they get Judy Geller to come and sit by the bar and look after Emma. And Judy is getting progressively wasted over the course of the dinner and Emma's sock falls off and Ross and Rachel are trying to get her attention and that's the point when Phoebe loses it. She stands up and she says, oh my God, pick up the sock, Judy.

1:12:49Pick up the sock. Pick up the sock. Oh my God. Even now if I watch that, I will be holding the piss in. I love when she finds a thumb in her can there's so many things in this show that like I mean there's so many like okay there's so many like jokes that are like oh they thought of a situation how can we make this situation as funny through the lens of Chandler how can we make it more intense through the lens of Monica and you're like right I understand joke writing this is interesting but then sometimes they just come up with literally the most random fucking things that you're like how did anyone come up with like that when like when she's giving birth to the twins and her her doctor's obsessed with the phones we're like because her original doctor is sick so he comes in and he's like so proper in a proper like new york sort of high status character he's like phoebe great to meet you i've had a look at your vitals everything looking great we're gonna get a thing in the air everything's gonna go amazing by the way i love fonzie oh my god and rachel is like i'm gonna fuck around and find diet and she basically throws in you know how i was like mark the doctor's like mark froze the phones phoebe's like undo that undo it undo it i love about phoebe that she's like such a like obviously a quirky character or whatever but like she has so little patience for other quirks other cooks she's like no no when the when the rubber hits the road i want my baby to be delivered by a normal person.

1:14:21Yeah, and she chases out the junior doctor and she's like, go little boy, go. Go little boy, go. Doogie. But the other one that kills me as well is when Phoebe, as a wedding present to Chandler and Monica, wants to give them her grandmother's cookie recipe. And it turns out, she finds out in the end that her grandmother has basically just passed off Nestle Tollhouse cookies as her own. and she screams at the floor, it's reasons like this, you're burning in hell.

1:14:56I think at one point as well, when she's talking about her grandmother, she refers to her as looking up at us. Maybe it's because she lied and said that her granddad was Albert Einstein. I don't know. What about the hell offence necessarily? Also, I feel like we haven't talked about the songs enough. What are your favourite songs from the VBV catalogue? I mean the obvious would be Smelly Cat isn't it? I feel like they overused Smelly Cat as like a thing. It was like the Mr. Hankey the Christmas Pooh of Friends. Do you know what I mean? Like it was funny enough and then I just felt like it became this odd chorus of the 90s that just took too long to die.

1:15:31I think that people just thought it was very funny. It's just not that funny. She wrote funnier songs. And I just realised that Please tell Ross hello to Santa Claus. Emma, your name poses a dilemma. I am waiting for my paper machine, man. Hello, my baby. Hello, my baby. So good. Are we just going to sing Fee Pee Buffet songs until the theme song plays as I... Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Sentimental garbage. Shamelessly commercial. Beep beep. Thanks Ryan. Thank you.