Joey's 'Friends' name was no coincidence

FOR 10 SEASONS on "Friends" and two more on "Joey," Matt LeBlanc played a character whose last name people have been misspelling for years.

It's Joey Tribuiani, not Tribbiani, says Broomall's Marta Kauffman.

She should know, having co-created "Friends" with Bala Cynwyd's David Crane - the pair met at Brandeis - and having given the character the surname of someone she knew.

"I have a sister - she was married to Raymond Tribuiani," Kauffman said in an interview this summer. "It's no coincidence. And Monica [whose name went to Courteney Cox's character] is my niece."

What Kauffman didn't know when she named LeBlanc's character: that her niece's father actually had a relative named Joey.

At one point, she said, "we got a call [from that Joey Tribuiani] . . . and he was really upset, because of the porn episode, that Joey had been in a porn movie."

- Ellen Gray