Ross and His Son Ben

Love it or hate it, Friends was one cultural phenomenon that swept across the world with a "WOOPAH" (insert whipped sound effect). One could argue that the quality of jokes went south as the series progressed... perhaps you found yourself screaming, "Could this show BE any stupider?" when Joey proved himself too stupid to repeat a few French phrases or he thought he had become a millionaire by finding his hand twin. Or perhaps the cleverer, well thought out, hilarious plot line when Rachel and Phoebe were sure that "Mondler" did not "know that we know that they know that we know" left you in stitches. Love it or hate it, Friends will go down as one of the better-known sitcoms in history.

But it certainly did leave one question unanswered, which this author would like to explore. In one of the earlier seasons of Friends, Chandler and Joey take Ross's son, Ben out for a day in city. On the bus, in their immortal, everlasting quest to get laid again & again, they strike up a conversation with two attractive women. They hop off at the next stop with the aforementioned ladies, forgetting Ben behind. Hilarity ensues, but let’s just stop and ask ourselves .... how hilarious is this situation? You have just lost a friend’s barely six-month-old baby that is not capable of uttering a single, legible word, let alone identify his father’s phone number, home address or anything that he could tell an authoritative figure to get him delivered into the right hands. Luckily our heroes, Chandler and Joey, rush to the City of New York Department of Health Services and little Ben is rescued!!

Or is he?

Chandler & Joey are at odds between two babies since all babies at that age look rather similar. One baby has clowns while the other has ducks drawn on his diapers. They flip for the baby as Joey declares, "Heads is ducks because ducks have heads." At this point Chandler delivers one of his most classic jokes to date, "What kind of scary ass clowns came to your birthdays?" (Amazing how we can defuse the gravity of the most serious situations with the right joke in the world of sitcoms).

They randomly choose one baby and head home. At this point they are still not sure if they have Ben or some other random baby with them. Relief & assurance comes to them when Monica picks Ben up and he starts to cry... something that he is known to do when aunt Monica ever gets close to him. This is literally the ONLY evidence they have of Ben's identity. At no point is a DNA test ever performed and as Ben ages, bears no resemblance to either Ross or his biological mother, Carol.

Of course the fact that Ross himself simply never made any attempt to make sure that Ben really was Ben, left us wondering how much he really cared. To make matters, weirder, Ben does not appear and is only mentioned six times in the last fifty four episodes of Friends. Add to that the fact that he never meets his half-sister Emma, perhaps Ross just stopped caring. Is it possible that on a subconscious level, he just knew Ben wasn’t his and Emma was? He slowly eased Ben out of his life to make way for Emma.

Bearing Ross’s homophobia in mind (not letting Ben play with Barbie dolls and refusing to hire a male nanny), perhaps he was happier off leaving (Ben, is it??) to be raised by his mother and her lesbian lover. Perhaps he just didn’t care because subconsciously, he knew that Joey and Chandler had lost Ben on the bus forever.

Oh, the dark the side of Friends!

The Dark Side of 'Friends'

Ross and his "Son" Ben?