It’s amazing how popular culture can have its imprint even upon the most surprising spaces of everyday life. We find ourselves drawn to certain artistic expressions, TV shows, fictional characters and musicians that we see worth looking up to, because the values they manifest are close to how we perceive the world. After encountering one of these popular culture elements, we find ourselves adopting certain aspects from them and incorporating them into spaces outside their natural sphere, into spaces of everyday reality. This is the mechanism through which music lyrics enter spoken or online written language variations or how Andy Warhol’s artworks entered many mediums outside that of visual arts. In this article, we will tackle a few instances in which sitcoms can influence naming conventions and the list of popular baby names but also present a few names which became memorable because of how hilarious they were in the show. This is a very particular example for the phenomenon of pop-culture entering reality and this piece focuses mainly on two very similar and widely known and loved TV-shows, which are “Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother”.
“Friends”
“Friends” is unsurprisingly one of the most classic sitcoms and its cultural influence is also of a very significant degree, from fashion and haircuts to style of humour, and reaching naming practices as well. The show features six main characters living in New York, who are young adults dealing with their everyday problems together, so their stories are very relatable for the general public. “Friends” premiered in 1994 and makes people laugh since then, its 10 seasons being impossible to watch only once, and offering people comfort through this familiarity. Due to its popularity, many parents entertained and fascinated by this show choose the name of one of the characters for their children, even those which were forgotten or unfashionable before the show aired.
We looked at the Social Security Administration’s baby naming data in order to find out the degree in which “Friends” might have influenced the list of popular baby names, focusing on the names of the main characters. First, there are names in the show which are classics and were popular anyway, for example Joey and Ben, which can be used as given names or hypocorisms as well, their origins being Joseph and Benjamin. Another such name is Emma, which is the name Monica would have liked to give her future daughter but then let Rachel and Ross choose it for their newborn baby, after seeing how perfectly it matches her. The episode with this scene aired in 2002, a year when the name jumped from rank 13th to 4th in the popularity rate compared to data from 2001. Lastly, there are the names Rachel and Monica, all-time classics as well. Rachel is a much loved name but it hit its all-time peak as the 9th most used girls name in 1996, only two years after the show premiered, and Monica was also much more widely used around the start of the show than nowadays.
Then, there are names that were considered more unconventional before “Friends” appeared, the most obvious one being Chandler, a source of many jokes in the show too. This unisex name reached its peak as a boys’ name right after the show premiered, until 1999, when it started to become less used. In the year 1994, it was 348th on the list, and in one year, it jumped to the 177th place.
Another special name in the friends group is Phoebe, which only grew in popularity since the TV series, reaching 405th place on the list until the show’s end in 2004 from the 900th that it occupied in 1993. In the case of the name Ross, we can also see the power of the series, since it was the most common in the years right after the start of the show, but then this enthusiasm for the moniker of the story’s paleontologist kept dropping.
“Friends” undoubtedly offers an inexhaustible list of special names for parents to choose from, according to their own favourites. There are a few more names in the show that count as more exotic, such as Gunther and Erica, but also some that the characters of the story came up with and exist only for the sake of fun. These are for example Phoebe’s many names chosen by herself for herself such as Regina Filange and Princess Consuela Bananahammock or Joey and Chandler’s shared name Ms. Chanandler Bong.
“How I Met Your Mother”
One of the series competing against “Friends” for popularity among viewers is “How I Met Your Mother”, and the tension in the fandom groups of these series is most probably given by the fact that they are rather similar in many aspects. The storyline of this sitcom also follows happenings around a group of friends living in Manhattan, New York City, but embedded in the frame of a very long story told by Ted to his children many years later. The show was released in 2005, in the year after “Friends” was finished, and continued their legacy by offering entertainment based on situations that can happen to anyone. Part of this legacy was the influence exercised upon names of the following generations.
The names which seem to have influenced the public the most are Marshall and Lily, both growing in popularity since the airing of the series. Marshall had the 419th place in 2005 but arrived at the 319th by the year 2014 when the show ended. Lily is an all-time favourite name for girls, which was the 39th most popular name in 2005 but then became more widespread and peaked in 2011, becoming the 15th on the list.
There are a few main characters whose name hasn’t made it to the list of the 1000 most popular names in the United States, and these are Ted and Barney. The first one can be used as an individual given name but is also the shortened version of Theodore, which surprisingly only grows in popularity since the start of the show, at the same time that its variant stagnates.
Robin can be found on the list but only at the end as a female given name, since it’s slightly more used for boys. Tracy is a name which used to be very popular in the 80s but its fame decreased since then and now there is no data about its usage. To give you a context, in the year 2014, when the show ended, the top name on the list of the 1000 most popular names was Noah for boys and Emma for girls.
There are more interesting names in the show closely related to the past of the characters, for example those of Ted’s children, Penny and Luke, which we might interpret as allusions to concrete events in their parents’ life. Penny might have gotten her name due to the episode entitled “Lucky Penny” where her father misses his flight because of an antique penny that he found and hoped to be valuable. It turns out, that the unfortunate event has helped him to meet Tracy. Luke’s name most probably comes from Ted’s passion for Star Wars (he also mentions that he wants to name his children Luke and Leia as a tribute to the movies). One memorable name from the series is that of Marshall and Lily’s son, Marvin Wait-for-it Eriksen which comes from a recurring catchphrase in the show. More funny nicknames by which characters call each other are Marshmallow (the one that Lily uses for Marshall) or Chewbacca (which is used by Ted for Lily because of her loud chewing).
The iconic sitcoms that we have taken a look at in this article don’t seize to offer entertainment despite the years that have passed since their release. As we have seen, TV shows not only popularize otherwise forgotten names but also enlarge the list of funny nicknames. We think that it’s worth finishing the article with a very deep contemplation about names coming from Chandler, the character whose name is truly a story of rise to fame: “I can handle this. Handle is my middle name. Actually, handle is the middle of my first name.”
