Matthew Perry changed the way America spoke

It is impossible, now, to watch it in the same way. The emphasis has changed—and emphasis is what matters in comedy. He’d always known that. The words, the sentence, the scene can be the same but alter the emphasis—lean a little harder on this word, push a little on that one—and the joke is transformed. He and his friends had played with this when they were at school. They’d developed their own way of speaking. “Could it any hotter?” they’d ask. “Could the teacher any meaner?” It changed everything.Emphasis was always his thing—it had got him the part in the first place. Everyone had wanted to be in “Friends Like Us” but in the audition it was he who had nailed it, reading the words in that unexpected way, “hitting emphases that no one else had hit”; making everyone laugh. It was less that he, Matthew Perry, could play Chandler than that he Chandler. He changed the part—and then the part changed him. Fame, fortune, money followed. And above all, The Big Terrible Thing. The thing so big, so terrible that it would demand emphatic capitals; cause him to return to rehab 14 times—and change the emphasis of those jokes for ever.