Matthew Perry was a friend to Gen X

Actor Matthew Perry appears on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" in 2004. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

As much as his contemporary Kurt Cobain, Matthew Perry was an icon of Generation X. “Friends” was the sitcom that defined us, and Mr. Perry’s Chandler Bing was its defining character. “Hi, I’m Chandler. I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable” was his signature line. When people say things like, “Could this be any more awkward?” it’s a Bingism.

Chandler was nearly Perry’s double: a tortured loner for whom cynicism was body armor. To the surprise of no one who read his nightmare addiction memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” he died prematurely on Saturday, at 54. His life finally ended in his hot tub in Los Angeles, but there were many occasions in which he nearly died from the effects of his addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Flip, sarcastic and allergic to attachment, Mr. Perry typified the Gen X sensibility in his 10 years as Chandler. Our age cohort (I was born in 1966, Perry three years later) has frequently been dismissed as nondescript, but what is special about us has become apparent in retrospect. We were the last generation to grow up predigital, meaning spoken conversation was our default means of communication. We were the first to accept gay people wholly. And we were scarred by divorce, which peaked when we were kids, like no generation before or since. Many of us sought to build replacement families out of pals living close at hand, taking dorm living as our model.

All these characteristics were built into “Friends.” It wasn’t the greatest sitcom of all time; it wasn’t even the best one on NBC on Thursday nights in the 1990s. But for those of us who were in our 20s, it was like looking into a mirror, and who can resist a mirror?

Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing in the episode The One With A Chick And A Duck.

Perry’s portrayal was informed by revealing conversations he had with the show’s writers. Unlike Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani (a caricature of a brainless actor) and David Schwimmer’s Ross Geller (painfully earnest and therefore not typical of a generation that venerates irony), Chandler was the perpetual wry observer, wisecracking from a distance. In his book, Perry says he broke up with his ’90s girlfriend Julia Roberts because he didn’t feel worthy. “Until I was 25,” Chandler once joked, “I thought the only response to ‘I love you’ was, ‘Oh crap!’ ”

Perry was frank in his memoir about how his parents’ divorce when he was a baby started “a lifetime of feeling abandoned,” a very Gen X trait. His mother, Suzanne, was so busy as press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, among other things, that he felt deserted by her too. When she remarried, to TV newscaster Keith Morrison, he felt apart from the new family, and “that’s when the bad behaviour started.”

It eventually ruined him. But as surely as Chandler Bing had a gift for turning despair into jokes, so did Matthew Perry. Recalling the late ’90s, just before checking himself into Hazelden for therapy, he wrote, “If I’d died then, my headstone would have read either: ‘HERE LIES MATTHEW PERRY—HE BROKE UP WITH JULIA ROBERTS’ or ‘COULD I BE MORE STUPID AND DEAD?’ ”