A True American Hero

Today we mourn the untimely death of Matthew Perry, who was found dead in his hot tub on October 28, 2023. This was a welcome surprise, since most people had Matthew Perry listed in their deathpools as “injecting balls with orange Jell-O at Burning Man” or “gunned down by Hamas” or “humping the jet inserts of his hot tub”. We may never know the cause of death, but we’ll always know the cause of our smiles.

Perry lived a long life, dying at basically half the age of Norman Lloyd with about twenty times the spunk. He was full of love, laughter, and jelly donuts, and friends and family would often affectionally refer to him as “fuckin’ Chandler-ass Bing”. There is a great sadness hanging in the air today, like a solemn fart from the butt of melancholy. We have certainly lost a treasure, and not the gold and jewels and scepters kind. More like the kind of treasure that is also one man’s trash.

Matthew Perry is survived by his five other Friends castmates (Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Haley Joel Osment, and R. Budd Dwyer). Let’s spend this moment reflecting on a true American hero’s life and celebrating the man that we all knew as Boring White Guy #2 from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Early Life

Matthew Perry was born Francis Vincent Suppleworth Perry on August 19, 1969 to parents Garfield Perry and Nermal Perry (née Himmler). After Garfield died in a smelting accident during his shift in the pork mines, Perry was adopted by Dateline NBC correspondent Keith Morrison once it was determined that Nermal was collecting too many Precious Moments figurines to be considered a worthy guardian.

Perry grew up on Morrison’s farm where he helped milk the goats and slaughter the pigs. Morrison would later write in his memoir Morrison: Murder Gets Me Hard that Perry would laugh while chasing chickens into the wee hours of the night while locked out of Morrison’s farmhouse. Perry graduated from Crawdad Steeplechase High School in 1988, intending to go to college that following fall until he was scouted at the only shopping mall within a 190-mile radius of his hometown of Picklefuck, Oklahoma. Originally an elbow model, Perry would go on to hone his natural acting talent in movies and film in the ’90s.

Tenure on Friends

Heartthrob Matthew Perry, 24, on the set of Friends in 1994 during the its landmark first season.

A successful stint as “Uncredited Extra #870” in the movie 10 Things I Hate About Chainsaw Massacres drew the attention of Friends co-creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman. They approached Perry and asked him to star in their pilot for a new television show about really white people in New York City who get in really white comedic situations with their really white acquaintances and family members. After shotgunning three cans of Coors Lite, Perry agreed to join the cast under the condition that he’d be able to spend his weekends “huntin’ snatch”.

Following Perry’s death, David Schwimmer (“Ross ‘Twinkle-Toes’ Gellar”) told Entertainment Weekly that things were a bit tumultuous on set for the first nine years of the series. Although great friends on camera, Perry and Matt LeBlanc (“Joseph Tribbiani Jones”) would fight constantly off the set. In one occasion, Perry split LeBlanc’s lip because “HE GETS TO BE THE ONE EVERYONE CALLS ‘MATT’ AND I DON’T LIKE IT!” This squabble was finally abated with a compromise that the cast and crew would refer to Perry as “Matthew” and LeBlanc as “Gerald”.

In a tell-all that Lisa Kudrow (“Fee-Bee Boo-Foo”) plans to release in 2024 called Friends with Bennies, Kudrow says that Perry was very respectful and appropriate with the female cast and crew “except when he would pour a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce all over Courteney Cox’s (“Monica Lewinsky”) head for ‘big league sexual reasons.'” Reportedly, he did this at least once every couple months. Cox started bringing pepper spray onto the set, but this only made Perry more feral with ecstasy. Eventually, Jennifer Aniston (“Jeff”) had to personally twist Perry’s penis into a pretzel using forceps so that they could finish the final 42 episodes of the series without incident.

After Friends and Beyond

Perry’s career following the wildly successful Friends was uneventful from a career standpoint, but plagued with eerie, shocking, ill-fated circumstances. For instance, after a completely coked-up Aaron Sorkin approached Perry for a part on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a piano fell from a tenth-story window onto Sorkin’s entire 76-person extended family. Sorkin pushed through one season, but the grief was too much to handle and the show was cancelled the same year. Sorkin would later cite Perry as the “sole cause of his hardship and loneliness”.

Perry sporting his trademark fashionable “business in the front, party in the back” signature hairstyle, which hardcore fans from Mississippi and Alabama still wear to this day.

During filming of the reboot of The Odd Couple between 2015 – 2017, Thomas Lennon was known to have accidentally sat on a wedding cake at least once a week. This became such a problem that the crew had Lennon wear plastic pants in between takes. One anonymous writer had pitched the idea of writing a scene into each episode of Felix Unger deliberately sitting on a cake until the producers reminded the writer that Felix was “the clean one”. The writer was subsequently fired. Both Thomas Lennon and the writer had to undergo extensive cognitive processing therapy following the end of the show.

Circumstances like these would occur so frequently that Perry decided to give up acting and pursue his dream of getting paid to take naps in hot tubs. He did this for over five years before realizing that no one was paying him any money. On August 1st, 2021, he vowed never to step into a hot tub again.

Perry spent the remaining two years of his life as a far-right activist. Although he wasn’t interested in politics during the famous attempt to overturn the United States 2020 election results, he has since become radicalized into believing that democracy has been eroded by left wing nanorobots that had infiltrated the bloodstreams of millions of vaccinated citizens across the country, and that “only Donald Trump’s cum” will save America. He attempted to use his past fame to start a movement against Joe Biden and his “Nazi Commie Pinko Fascist Libertarian <redacted>-loving <redacted>-fondling <redacted>-<redacted> Hyena Agenda”, but only three people showed up to his first and only rally. These three individuals were reportedly lost on the way to Steak ‘n Shake and had stopped to hear the “really angry, red man hootin’ and hollerin’.”

We all miss Matthew Perry already and we hope that this tender tribute will suitably honor the man, the legend, the hero, the god. We wish his family a lot of good luck in the future getting over it, and the whole staff here at Tom Writes About Stuff will donate $0.03 to the “Matthew Perry Fund”, which you can find as a coin slot on any vending machine in the country.

RIP Matthew Perry, America’s favorite Muppet.