I’ve been hearing a radio ad representing a discussion between a man and a woman who, we find out, is not his wife. She’s listing all the wonderful things they could do on the new deck. He says, "Or, or: you could bug your husband about getting a deck on your house. It sounds very Chandler Bing, but is that construction older than “Friends”?
I don’t remember Chandler doing that but it was a running joke on an episode of How I Met Your Mother once.
I don’t think the “or…” thing was even consciously created by the writers of Friends, at least not at first. It just arose from Chandler’s need to point out how off-kilter the other characters were:
Joey (or Rachel or Phoebe or whoever): “Let’s do this wacky, overcomplicated thing!”
Chandler: “Or we could just do this much simpler but less dramatic thing…”
Chandler was the show’s way of disarming the nitpickers in the audience by acknowledging just how preposterous some of the characters’ viewpoints were.
Actually, I never associated “or” as a specific Chandler Bing catch-phrase - I always took his catch-phrase (as it was) to be some derivative of “Could it BE any…”
I’m thinking specifically of a repeated “or” with the accent on the second instance, which I distinctly hear in Matthew Perry’s voice. I may be misremembering this.
I’ve heard that used the way you described, but I’d say only several times in my life. But I’m out of touch on a lot of pop culture.
I’m almost positive you’re thinking of Neil Patrick Harris as Barney saying it in How I Met Your Mother.
When I hear things like, “or, or,” or “you, you,” I think of Jimmy Stewart. There used to be a radio guy around my neck of the woods who not only threw those into the ads he read, but he even seemed to be impersonating Jimmy Stewart.
Children. I’m surrounded by children.
I remember this as being a recurring joke line in the old Dick Van Dyke show back in the sixties. Morey Amsterdam played the part of one of the writers on Dick’s team. Morey was always coming up with some hairbrained scheme that would result in astonished stares from the rest of the cast. Morey would then attempt a recovery with “…or…”.
You’re missing the point of the OP, which is the occurrence of the specific phrase, a double “or” = “or, or…”
That’s what I came in to post, too.