“This is a family place.
Put the mouse back in the house.”
Gunther is one of the great mysteries of Friends --
we never even learn his last name.
“What's my last name?”
“Central Perk?”
We get hints that he COULD be a fascinating person
if we got to know him better.
[Speaking Dutch] “Bendakt voor de koffie, Gunter.”
[Speaking Dutch] “Jij spreekt Nederlands?
Dat is te gek.
Heb je familie daar?”
But that interesting guy never materializes.
Gunther just stays in the background, quietly working the same boring job
at Central Perk for ten seasons and counting.
He doesn’t leave for a more exciting career, nor does he find romantic happiness,
or even get to become one of the friends... which he clearly wants to be.
“Gunther, six glasses!”
“Six?
You want me to join you?”
“Oh, I thought Joey was here.
Five is good.”
Gunther has some big things in common with some of the friends:
like Rachel, he works at the coffee house.
“Remind me to review with you which pot is decaf and which is regular.”
Like Ross, he’s in love with Rachel.
“Well the money’s good, plus you get to stare at Rachel
as much as you want.”
Like Chandler, he’s addicted to cigarettes.
“Oh, dark mother, once again I suckle at your smoky teat.”
And like Joey, he used to be on a soap opera.
“I used to be Bryce on All My Children.”
But while the friends go on to fulfill their greater potential,
“I got the job!”
“I got tenure!”
“And now they want me, I start shooting today!”
Gunther is what their lives would have been if they HADN’T.
Gunther’s lack of growth makes him the cautionary tale of Friends,
he’s the person you don’t want to end up like.
“A grown man getting people coffee is a little humiliating.
Humiliating and noble.”
In this show about young adults becoming fulfilled and successful,
Gunther’s stagnation represents what happens when you don’t push yourself
to go for what you want.
So let’s talk about what we can all learn from Gunther’s failure to launch.
“I’d really like to ask you out sometime.”
“Wow, um…”
[Crashing sound]
Before we go on, we want to talk a little bit
about this video's sponsor -- Skillshare.
Skillshare is a superb online learning community
with thousands of classes about everything.
Photography, illustration, music production.
Click the link in the description below
to get 2 months access to all classes for free.
[Music]
“Oh, sure!
Do you need me to train somebody new?”
[Laughs] “Haha, good one.”
Friends generally paints working in unsatisfying jobs
as a rite of passage in your twenties.
“Why would such a person stay in such a demeaning job,
just because it's remotely related to the field they're interested in?”
“Gee, I don't know, Rach.”
When we first meet Gunther in his job as manager at Central Perk,
he seems to be in that phase of life too,
and over the seasons Rachel and Joey both work under him.
“I wanna show you why we don’t just trap spiders under coffee mugs and leave them there.”
“Put on your apron.”
The difference is that they both move on and find professional fulfillment.
But Gunther remains.
“Do you know why I'm a terrible waitress?
Because I don't care.
I don't care.
I don’t care which pot is regular and which pot is decaf.
I don't care where the tray spot is.
I just don't care.
This is not what I want to do.”
Rachel is admittedly a very bad waitress,
“Okay who ordered what?”
“Oh I believe I had the half-drunk cappuccino with the lipstick on the rim.”
“Yes, and this with the cigarette but in it,
is that decaf?”
but she goes on to be very skilled and successful in the field she CARES about.
“You’re this big executive.”
Meanwhile Gunther has his job at the coffee house down pat,
and maybe that’s the problem.
He’s comfortable in a position that’s easy and safe,
“I make four bucks an hour.” and offers no future.
“You need The Fear.”
“The Fear?”
“He’s right if you quit this job,
you then have motivation to go after a job you really want.”
Gunther never embraced the fear, and so he gives us a glimpse of
how Rachel’s future might have played out, if she hadn’t been brave enough
to leave in search of something more.
“And no offense to everybody who still works here,
but you have no idea how good it feels to say
that as of this moment, I will never have to make coffee again.”
“Rachel has those in burgundy.”
If Gunther is Rachel's cautionary tale when it comes to career ambition,
he's Ross’ cautionary tale for romance.
Like Ross, Gunther is hopelessly in love with Rachel.
[Thinking] “I love Rachel.
I wish she was my wife.”
But be keeps his feelings SO hidden that Rachel doesn’t have a clue.
“I didn’t initiate the kiss, but I also didn’t stop it.
I’ve been feeling guilty.”
“Okay.”
She actually thinks he’s gay.
“Someday you are gonna make some man the luckiest guy in the world.”
The guy is deeply repressed.
In the words of actor James Michael Taylor, quote:
“He was unfulfilled and had a lot of emotion underneath,
but really couldn’t express himself very well.”
“Hi Gunther.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
Ross also spends years pining for Rachel, without speaking up about his feelings.
[Angrily] “So, you’re just gonna what,
put away feelings or whatever the hell it was
that you felt for me.”
“Hey I’ve been doing it since the ninth grade,
I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.”
“Alright fine, you go ahead and you do that, alright Ross.”
But Gunther never progresses beyond the pining-from-a-distance phase.
“I did it all by myself!
And there’s nobody to hug.”
[Gunther runs] “Move!”
Despite working with Rachel when she moves to the city,
he doesn't form any real relationship with her.
Instead, he expresses his feelings in indirect ways.
He buys Rachel’s hairless cat.
“Don't forget, you can come visit her anytime you want.”
“Oh good, great, I’ll keep that in mind.”
When Rachel is apartment-hunting, Gunther is ready to give up his place for
her.
“I was going to offer you my apartment.”
“Why, where you going?”
“I don’t know.”
And when she pressures him to rehire Joey at the coffee house,
it doesn’t take much to convince him.
“I want you to give Joey his job back.
That is really not fair that you have to fire him--”
“Ok.”
Gunther is so desperate to know Rachel, he’ll give up everything in his life
for a remote possibility of feeling closer to her.
“So what is this some kind of snake or something?”
But he’s so terrified of actually letting Rachel know him
that he can’t do the far simpler but harder thing,
of starting a real conversation with her.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright… sweetheart.”
He’s put her on a pedestal to the degree that he’s completely debilitated by his
infatuation.
[Thinking] “Say, Rachel, I was wondering if you'd like to
go to a movie with me sometime... as my lover.”
There's actually a word for this kind of extreme lovesickness -- limerence.
Limerence is an obsessive longing for another person,
usually characterized by yearning and fantasizing,
as well as misery at the thought that one’s feelings might not be reciprocated.
“Maybe you’d just like to get something to eat with me sometime... as my lover.”
Gunther could have a healthy relationship with plenty of other women who DO notice him.
“I certainly see why the girls like coming here.”
“Why?”
“The sexy blonde behind the counter.”
“How can you compare yourself to Gunther?
I mean, sure, he's sexy in a more obvious way.”
But he's paralyzed by this imaginary romance he’s carrying on with Rachel in his head.
Many of us can relate to Gunther’s infatuation.
Through Ross, we get the satisfaction of imagining
that unrealistic crush becoming a great love story.
“You know it was one of those things you think was never gonna happen,
and then it does, and it’s everything you want it to be.”
Ross’ story may be a little aspirational, and it’s thanks to Chandler's mistake...
“Remember back in college when he fell in love with Carol
and bought her that ridiculously expensive crystal duck.”
“What’d you just say?”
that Ross escapes Gunther's fate of continuing to love in secret.
“I mean does he like wanna go out with me?”
“Well given that he’s desperately in love with you,
he probably wouldn’t mind getting a cup of coffee or something.”
Still, Ross doesn’t just end up with Rachel by chance.
He builds a strong friendship with her, and then he puts himself out there
and shows Rachel how much he loves her.
So, just as we saw in Rachel’s career, in our love lives, too,
we have to be brave, and go for it.
In the end, Gunther finally confesses his love to Rachel,
way, way too late.
“I know you're leaving tonight, but I just have to tell you,
I love you.”
While it’s doubtful the outcome would have been different
if he’d done this 10 years sooner,
he wouldn’t have wasted a decade lusting after an illusion.
He could have moved on and sought a real relationship.
The sad thing is we can see that Gunther’s romantic paralysis
has made him bitter.
“Gunther, please tell me you didn’t say anything to Rachel
about me and the girl from the copy place.”
“I’m sorry, was I not supposed to?”
Gunther continues to express his spite toward Ross
in constant passive aggressive behavior.
“Oh, I’m just making a list of people’s birthdays.”
“Oh, mine’s December…”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Um, I’m looking for someone.
You don’t by any chance know a Ross Geller.”
“No.”
Gunther’s stunted emotional state is a stark contrast to the growth
we see from all the friends.
In the end, we have to feel bad for Gunther because he doesn’t experience the joys
of forming mature adult relationships, which is what Friends is all about.
After Joey is killed off Days of Our Lives,
he has to deal with the fallout of originally taking his big break for granted,
he’s forced to start auditioning for smaller parts again.
“Cab Driver number two?”
“You’re welcome.”
“But I was Dr. Drake Ramoray.”
And he has to return all the expensive stuff he bought with his soap opera paychecks.
“How much to save the bird?”
“Twelve Hundred.”
“Dollars?
You spent twelve hundred dollars on a plastic bird?”
He also gets a dose of reality thanks to this short exchange with Gunther:
“I was buried in an avalanche.”
“What?”
“I used to be Bryce on All My Children.”
This is yet another comic allusion to Gunther’s mysterious other life
we know nothing about.
But the lesson in this reveal is that you can make it big,
and then lose everything.
“But this is a two-line part, it’s like taking a step backwards.”
We think of paying our dues as something that happens before success,
but the reality is that fortunes rise and fall.
Joey is punished for his arrogance, in claiming falsely that he writes his own
lines.
“Makes up most of his lines, son of a…[scoff] Yeah well, write this jerkweed.”
“I fall down an elevator shaft?”
AND a couple seasons later, he’s working at the coffee house himself.
“Well, if you want you can work here.”
“Uh, I don’t know, it’s just, see I was a regular on a soap opera yaknow
and to go from that to this...”
So the lesson is that we shouldn’t feel superior to the Gunthers in our lives.
And if we want to keep being successful,
we have to continue to work hard, push ourselves, and stay humble.
“Things change, roll with em.”
We talked in our Janice video
about how Janice keeps popping up in the friends’ lives
as if fate is declaring that she will not be ignored.
“What a small world!”
“And yet I never run into Beyonce.”
Gunther is the opposite.
He doesn’t show up and steal the focus, he’s always there,
but in the background, almost invisible.
After the friends, he’s in the most episodes, 185,
but it wasn’t until his 33rd appearance that he even got a line, which was:
“Yeah.”
He’s essentially a human piece of furniture.
So we, and the friends, kind of forget about him.
“See you tomorrow at the wedding.”
“I wasn't invited.”
“Well, then we'll see you the day after tomorrow.”
We all have a Gunther in our life, someone we potentially could get to know better
but never bother to.
“I’m leaving to get my hair dyed.”
“Really, I like your natural color.”
We might occasionally wonder why we don’t make the effort,
whether, if we did, we might find this person is actually a hidden gem.
“Gunther.
I mean, he's nice.
He's cute.”
“Yeah.
I guess Gunther is kinda...”
“What about that guy over there?”
Yet something stops us, and that something is probably
that person doesn’t have the confidence to put himself out there and MAKE us take
notice.
“If you want to go, just go.”
“No, she’ll yell at me again.”
It’s Gunther’s lack of faith in himself that guarantees he ends up
exactly where he started,
in the same job and holding onto the same unrequited love.
We might think getting into the room, getting near people we want to know,
is a good start.
“I’m gonna invite Gunther because we’ve been
talking about this pretty loudly.”
“I’ll be there.”
But proximity to an interesting scene isn’t being interesting,
and proximity to a great friendship group doesn’t make you one of the gang.
Gunther proves that in life it’s not enough to just be around.
You have to make things happen.
Friends emphasizes that these scary moves in search of greater rewards are
the essential challenge of our 20s.
Because if you don’t muster the courage to leave your comfort zone,
you stand a very real chance of winding up repressed and resentful.
“Um, can I get a napkin too?”
“Oh, like you don't already have everything.”
It’s scary not to know where we might end up,
but it’s far scarier to imagine never going anywhere at all.
So through Gunther we learn one of the show’s most profound lessons
that the real risk is never taking one.
“And when I'm in a cafe, having coffee, or I see a man with hair brighter than the
sun,
I'll think of you.”
Have you always wanted to learn how to paint or write personal essays?
Is your goal for the year to master cinematography?
Are you looking for leadership tips to fuel your career?
As we go into 2019,
Skillshare can help you turn those intentions into something concrete.
Our New Year’s Resolution here at The Take is
to improve our animation know-how,
and we’re using Skillshare to do it.
They offer more than 25,000 classes about any skill you might want to learn,
all for less than ten dollars a month.
Right now you can get two months access to all of their classes for free,
but that’s only if you’re one of the first 500 people
to click the link in the description below.
So don’t wait, try Skillshare today.