ODDS AND FRIENDS

Lisa Kudrow has had a Buffay of comic roles that often go unnoticed. As the actor leads new sci-fi series 'Time Bandits', Adam White praises the appeal of this quirky comedy legend

- Adam White

Phoebe Buffay never made a ton of sense. How did an oddball masseuse with a history of violence, homelessness and probable mental illness – but, like, in a funny way – become simpatico with the sunny, middle-class yuppies of Friends? “It was just a matter of time before someone had to leave the group, I just always assumed Phoebe would be the one to go,” Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel once said, to Phoebe’s immediate horror. “You live far away, you’re not related – you lift right out.”

An often unspoken element of the Friends friendship dynamics was that Phoebe, as played by the inimitable comic genius Lisa Kudrow, never did fit in. You can sense, in the show’s first season, Kudrow’s co-stars figuring out in real time how their characters interacted with her. Some take on an eyeroll-y affect whenever she expresses a nutty non-sequitur. Others are almost too sympathetic, as if Phoebe isn’t their buddy but a really, really nice extraterrestrial they’re too polite to stop inviting round. By the end of Friends, this would shift: Phoebe became sort of mean. She would yell, bully and remember with fondness how she once mugged Ross; it was obvious which of the gang she couldn’t stand. Were the Friends still friends with her because they liked her, or because they were scared of her?

Whatever the answer, this incongruity – that sense that everyone around them is silently asking “why are you here?” – is the key to Kudrow. Over the course of her 30-year career, the actor has been drawn to misfits and kooks. She likes to play women in possession of any number of life’s advantages – be they beauty, fame, money or power, or some combination of the above – but to whom acceptance is a far-flung fantasy.