Throughout its 10 seasons, Friends has a catalog of plot holes and inconsistencies that fans have picked up on over the years. Most of these are inoffensive, and people can brush past them. Others are a bit more irritating, and some are born from character contradictions where they go against established facts in the show, something which Joey Tribianni is guilty of.
Whether they be related to him and his own life and intelligence or if he is referencing something that came up earlier in the show, Joey makes many contradictions to the established canon in Friends.
One of the most iconic Joey quotes and moments in Friends is when he announces that he does not share food, with Rachel hammering home the point, saying he even prevented Emma from having one of his measly grapes.
However, Joey does share food. There is the obvious sandwich incident with Chandler, but that can be forgiven as an act of apology. That is not the only incident, though. Joey is also willing to give Phoebe a bite of his muffin and drink of his coffee when she asks and he even offers his beloved jam to the other friends.
When the Friends gang return from their hilarious beach holiday, Joey, Monica, and Chandler confess about the jellyfish incident, with Chandler saying that sometimes at night, he can still hear the screams and Joey revealing that he makes those noises through the wall at night.
This cannot be the case, though, as the gang had not slept since the beach. They are all wearing the same clothes and are shown to have left the beach day of the incident, meaning they could not have slept for one night at their apartments, much less multiple, to make Joey's prank on Chandler feasible.
Dates and years can often get iffy in Friends. The birthdays of the friends are infamously confusing and contradicted, but so too is the year in which Joey moves in with Chandler.
In a flashback episode to the day that they did meet and move in together, the year was 1993, a year before the setting of season 1. However, in "The One With All The Thanksgivings," Joey gets a turkey stuck on his head in 1992.
Early in Friends, Joey is shown to be close to his sisters, inviting them to parties at his apartment and attending dinner with them. After their couple of appearances, though, they never pop up again.
Joey is established early on to be family-oriented, caring far more about them than himself. For years, though, his sisters go scarcely mentioned and seen only one other time, which is pretty baffling. Even when that one other time comes rounds and Dina announces her pregnancy, the child never comes up, and Joey is not shown to be a present presence in their lives.
One of the sillier contradictions in Friends is the ability of Chandler to make pancakes. Given the range of breakfast choices out there, it is a pretty funny coincidence that this contradiction exists at all.
When the fan-favorite Friends' side character, Janice, makes pancakes for them in season 3, Chandler fleetingly mentions that he cannot make them. Joey contradicts this by telling Rachel that Chandler used to make pancakes for his dates. Chandler could have, of course, learned how to make pancakes, but knowing what he was like during that time, that seems wildly unlikely.
While many fans view this as one of the funniest Phoebe and Joey episodes, there is no doubt that Joey's inability to learn French is not only poor but entirely nonsensical.
While not the greatest actor ever, Joey has shown an immense talent for memorizing complex lines that he does not understand, such as through his trip to the MET or his time in Days Of Our Lives. Therefore, his drastic inability to understand or repeat French makes absolutely no sense.
A plot hole that annoys some fans is one shared between Joey, Ross, and Chandler and relates to their love of Die Hard, which leads to Joey and Ross' napping affair.
There are a couple of references to the movie throughout Friends' run by Joey, and it seems to be a shared favorite of the guys. When Bruce Willis pops up as Paul, though, this love of Die Hard is totally ignored. Of course, few people really care. Friends just hired Bruce Willis as he was a massive star. Still, some are irritated by the hammering home of the guy's love of the film, only for the main character actor to have a run in the show as someone else.
Joey comes from a big Italian-American family, and that helped shape him into who he is as well as remaining a big part of his identity. For as much as he cares about his family, though, he appears to forget how many sisters he has, or at least that he is a child of his parents.
In season 1, Joey references the fact that his mother gave birth to seven kids. However, Joey has seven sisters, a well-established fact about the Tribianni family, so there had to be at least eight, including him. Now, this could be explained by Joey forgetting about himself or just miscounting, but that is hard to believe, even by Joey's standards.
As the series goes on, Joey's intelligence appears to deteriorate alarmingly. He was never the smartest character in the show, but he is not as wholly stupid as he is made out to be in the later seasons.
His use and misunderstanding of air quotes is a prime example of his lack of intelligence but is itself a contradiction considering Joey used air quotes in earlier seasons in the perfectly right context. Joey is, of course, one of the best characters in Friends, but he did get mistreated in the later seasons by the writing.
Another instance of Joey's decreasing intelligence involves his Adam's apple. At a party for Monica, he describes it as his "Joey's apple," leading Chandler to correct him, which he appears to be doing for the umpteenth time.
Early in the show, though, Joey knows very well that it is called an Adam's apple and not named after the individual person as he describes how he dated someone who had Adam's apple. Unless his date's name was Adam, Joey clearly knew what it was early in the show.
