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One of the greatest lies polite society ever told was that sarcasm is a bad thing. That people who rely on it use it as a crutch, a shield, or a mask—a way of presenting themselves to the world without having to be authentic, vulnerable, or, scariest of all, earnest. The sins of sarcasm have come down from some moral mount, and passed on through generations: It is mean; it is disrespectful; it is lazy; it is poor manners; it is condescending… At some point, the thesaurus runs out of synonyms, but you get the gist.
What the finger-waggers and buzzkills skip over, as if they’re guarding a secret they don’t want to get out, is the sarcasm is also extremely funny. And, when done right, it exposes what is maybe one of the most complicated and brutally honest parts of the human condition. Matthew Perry didn’t just do sarcasm right. His nearly four-decade acting career leaves behind a masterclass in the magic of it: its value, its relatability, and its power to do what is paradoxically the most difficult and simplest thing in the world, which is making us laugh.
If you’re anything like me, your Saturday night was interrupted by a flurry of texts, alerts, and social media posts reacting in shock to the news that Perry had died at age 54 at his home in Los Angeles. When someone this unfathomably famous dies so suddenly, it’s as trippy as it is heartbreaking. Perry is so young now, to die in his fifties. But he is so young forever, frozen in time in his vibrant twenties and thirties in what ranks as one of the most popular entertainment properties in history, Friends.