“The One Where the Stripper Cries”

Friends season 10, episode 11
Original air date: February 05, 2004

As Phoebe counts down to her wedding day, Monica and Rachel hold a nice shower for her in Monica's apartment. Phoebe quietly asks Rachel, though, when the stripper's coming, since she can't believe that the little tea party is all there is. Rachel tells her that she and Monica thought that maybe they were a little old to be having strippers at their bachelorette parties, and Phoebe freaks out. Rachel tells her she's just kidding, then scrambles to hire a stripper on the spot.

Unfortunately, the first name in the book that she could get on short notice is a fat, bald, short, old guy with an attitude (Danny DeVito). As he huffs and puffs from the many flights of stairs, Phoebe can't believe that this is her stripper. When he begins his dance, Phoebe can't keep a straight face, and she eventually interrupts him to ask him to leave. She refuses to pay him, and he begins to cry.

While the girls are having their party, Chandler and Ross are attending a college reunion party. They bump into a girl that they both wanted to date in college, and Ross wants to go talk to her, but he first has to ask Chandler to release him from "the pact." Apparently back in college, they made a pact, at least a couple of times, not to date certain girls, because they didn't want a girl to come between their friendship. Chandler releases Ross from the pact, and he approaches the girl to ask her out.

When he does, she asks why it took him so long to do so. He explains about "the pact," and she laughs: turns out that she and Chandler made out a number of times in college, and he just kept it quiet. Ross confronts him about it, but Chandler points out that Ross also broke the pact at a party just before Christmas vacation freshman year. Ross pretends not to know what he's talking about, so Chandler lays it all out (complete with flashbacks):

They're at a party, and Ross has invited Monica and Rachel to attend. At one point during the night, he sees Ross in a corner, making out with one of the girls from "the pact." After witnessing this, he finds Rachel and makes out with her, since she's very drunk. Afterwards, he puts her to bed on his bed.

During all of this chaos, Joey's a guest participant on "Pyramid," and he's so bad at the game that his partners win zero points on each round. Eventually, the guy he started out with ends up in the Winner's Circle (after playing a few rounds with the other celebrity participant), where he's again paired with Joey. Miraculously, though, the categories are all things that Joey can guess with ease: types of trees; Spanish words; things that burn; what a dog might say; pizza toppings. Until they get to "Cindy Crawford, Heidi Klum, Christy Turlington," and Joey just can't quite come up with "supermodels."

Back to the bachelorette party, where Phoebe, Monica, and Rachel have calmed the stripper down and given him some career advice. He says he's not sure what else he can do, because he's been a stripper his entire life. Finally, though, they convince him to open a school to teach men how to be strippers, and he's overjoyed. They convince him to dance his last dance just for them, and he goes into it with great gusto.

As Monica's cleaning up from the party, Ross and Chandler burst in, and Ross asks Monica if she knew that Chandler had kissed Rachel at that party fifteen years ago. She says she didn't know that, and Chandler asks Ross why he's so upset, considering that it was so long ago. Ross says that the night Chandler kissed Rachel was the night he also first kissed Rachel, and it's always been very important to him. Chandler asks when Ross kissed her, and he says it was after Chandler put her to bed on Ross' bed. Chandler insists that it was his own bed he put Rachel on, and Ross says that no, he definitely kissed the girl on his bed. Which, of course, turns out to have been Monica, disgusting all of them.