Image via Netflix

The smudged and weeping clown is a face well worn into our imagination, and it is almost too obvious an irony that so many of the greatest comedians led lives of tragedy. Matthew Perry, who died in 2023 at the age of 54, follows in a sad lineage that includes Peter Sellers and Robin Williams. His life has now been memorialised in this documentary, a compilation of interviews and archive footage that is too cutely titled The One about Matthew Perry .

You get the sense from watching it that Perry, a student of comedy and its collaterals, knew exactly what was happening to him and could have described the arc to come. A few weeks before he was cast in Friends , he prayed, “God, you can do anything you want to me, just please make me famous,” a line he was to quote and requote with lacings of remorse in years to come.…