Screen Legends 3: Matt Le Blanc

Matt Le Blanc is chiefly known for impersonating a stout sybarite, led by his overweening priapism and nauseating gluttony to the very brink of damnation. A confirmed fornicator, given to lewd ribaldry and base dissipation, who, when satiated, lay with a belly swelling up to the heavens as if to affront his maker, in a bed besmeared with sweetmeats, quince and sperm: the character of Joey in the hit sitcom ‘Friends’ was so memorable that he got his own spin-off show. Sadly, it tanked. But, as Barack Obama pointed out in a speech to a Wisconsin Women’s Methodist group, “there are only so many jokes you can make about being a fat man-slag before it just gets depressing.”

‘Friends’ taught us that wherever you go, you will always have friends. It also taught us that a social network comprised of an equal number of males and females could repopulate a city if each couple had four children and their courting habits were strictly regulated to prevent inbreeding. Yea, Joey and Phoebe begat Joshua and Sara who begat Noah and Ruth who begat Ralphy and Zipper who, unfortunately, didn’t get round to begetting as Season 9 was never aired.

Besides ‘Friends’ and ‘Joey’, Matt Le Blanc has only starred in ‘Lost in Space’, in which he plays a plump astronaut who is impregnated, against his will, by a sinister Caucasian arachno-pod. The irony was not lost on anyone, least of all Le Blanc. After a huge egg pops out of his rectal cavity and cracks, allowing a thousand nasty little spiders to hatch and scuttle all over the space ship, Le Blanc looks down at his brood and winks. ‘How you doin’?’ he exclaims, lasciviously, as the scene ends and Le Blanc fails to get another significant movie role for a few years.