History Fridge / Friends

* In one episode, Joey refers to something as "a moo point", explaining that said issue "is like a cow's opinion: it's meaningless... it's 'moo'." This may just seem like another moment of Joey's stupidity and him mis-hearing the word "moot" at some point in his past (and on the surface, it most likely is). However, in Zen Buddhism, ''mu'' is used to refer to meaninglessness. Which turns it from an IncrediblyLamePun (also in character with Joey) to a StealthPun.

* Ross is a mixture of InsufferableGenius and HonorBeforeReason, but you wouldn't see why until you looked at him this way; Monica had to grow up always being TheUnfavorite while Ross was the star child of the family and because of this, Ross was always praised for every single thing that he did while growing up and should Ross ever get into trouble, it would be safe to assume that his parents would do everything they could to quiet the mess so that Ross still comes out looking good. This leads to the present day Ross always trying to prove to his friends how he is right (whether it's on dinosaurs, who did wrong in a relationship, etc.) and how nothing is ever his fault. A good example of this is "The One With All the Secrets" where Monica told her parents Ross smoked pot in college (because Ross refused to admit it and had put the blame on Chandler back then).

* Joey's extreme reaction when people take food off his plate ("JOEY DOESN'T SHARE FOOD!!!") makes a lot more sense when you remember that he has seven sisters. Anyone who grew up in a big family can tell you that siblings frequently steal each other's food, sometimes even just to annoy each other, and protecting your plate is something you learn early on. It's especially telling that most of the people who try it in the episode are female - he has a learned fear of girls stealing his food!
* In The Final One when Monica & Chandler bring [[spoiler: the twins]] home, Rachel says "I'm sorry I wont be around to see you attempt to handle this", she's speaking for all of us in the audience.

** Which leads to a second degree of fridge brilliance - Chandler's insistence on helping out the "hot" girls from their building whose radiator had also broken, back in season 1. Had Joey heroically fixed their radiator, they'd have a guaranteed date.

*** Which, if you remember, was what happened to Rachel's manly boyfriend Jack!

* In 'The One With the Prom Video', Monica watches the rest of the prom video while the credits are rolling, only for the video to change to a homemade sex tape of her parents. However, what makes this worse is that we see the camera is actually zooming in, meaning that someone had to be controlling the camera ...

* Phoebe can't speak Italian in season 1, but she can talk to Joey's grandmother in Italian in season 5. Seems like a continuity error, until you consider that she may have learned Italian to be able to talk to Paolo when Rachel started dating him.

** Also, why the ladies don't know what Chandler's job is? He hates his job. So, either (1) he does want to talk about it, and the others don't know the details, or (2) he constantly rants about his job, and it gets drowned out and ignored. Joey would likely know being Chandler's roommate for years, and Ross was close friends with Chandler when he first got the job and title.

* So, if we're counting, Phoebe has: lost a mom to suicide and a stepdad to prison, been abandoned by her biological father, had hepatitis from a pimp spitting in her mouth, lived in a Buick LeSabre and a Gremlin, had a friend called "Stabby Joe," has been stabbed by a cop, had a man extort sex from her when she was a teenager, been tortured, took up mugging to survive on the street, and been in prison herself, which apparently went badly as she will "never go back to that hellhole." She doesn't know her own middle name or her correct birth year (until season 9)--and this is just what we ''know'' about.

* In the last episode, Monica and Chandler are moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and Ross and Rachel are getting back together and raising Emma (and any more that come along) in the city. Why didn't they just move into the apartment so that Ross could stop sub-letting Ugly Fat Guy's apartment? The place was rent-controlled, probably not like UFG's sub-let, and all of them stayed there at one point of their lives (Ross was in the spare bedroom during one summer from college.)

* More like fridge sadness -- Phoebe comments on her mother's attempts to "save" her from the endings of sad movies as being incongruous with the fact that she committed suicide, but if her mother was suicidally depressed [[spoiler:or the partner of a depressed person]] and living in miserable circumstances, it makes sense that she'd want to shelter her kids from even fictional downer endings, the only kind of sadness she might have felt she had control over.