Friends might be one of your favourite, funny television shows, but to the younger generations that’s not the case.
Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel Green in the hit sitcom throughout its ten-year run, has said she believes that ‘comedy has evolved’ over the years, meaning that most of the jokes made on the show would not be as well received by a current, younger audience.
With a star studded cast of Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer, the sitcom quickly became one of the most popular TV series of all time, and still to this day remains iconic.
However, Aniston thinks that theres now a ‘whole generation’ of people who find the show offensive.
Although appropriate and ‘harmless’ at the time, there’s lots of sitcoms, like Friends, that carry themes of casual homophobia, sexism and lack of diversity that would not be able to air today.
“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive,” she explained, whilst promoting her new Netflix comedy with Adam Sandler, Murder Mystery 2.
“There were things that were never intentional and others… well, we should have thought it through – but I don’t think there was a sensitivity like there is now.”
“Comedy has evolved, movies have evolved,” Aniston continued. “Now it’s a little tricky because you have to be very careful, which makes it really hard for comedians, because the beauty of comedy is that we make fun of ourselves, make fun of life.
“You could joke about a bigot and have a laugh. That was hysterical. And it was about educating people on how ridiculous people were, and now we’re not allowed to do that,” she complained.
“Everybody needs funny! The world needs humour! We can’t take ourselves too seriously. Especially in the United States. Everyone is far too divided.”
And it looks like the creator of the show agrees, who recently admitted to being “embarrassed” by the show’s lack of diversity and pledged $4m to fund an endowed chair at Brandeis University’s African and African American Studies department.
Kauffman said, “I think we didn’t have the knowledge about transgender people back then, so I’m not sure if we used the appropriate terms.”
The show has certainly remains a hot topic online, with people on Twitter sharing their thoughts on the humour used.
”I watched Friends the entire time I was in the hospital recently & thought this when they showed a flashback of Chandler where he made fun of Monica being fat… a lot of shows we used to watch are problematic & definitely wouldn’t be shown today,” one person wrote.
”Friends was definitely a product of its time and I wish Jennifer Aniston had just come clear about that. The jokes were problematic and didn’t necessarily resolve them in healthy ways. Even for as popular as it is, it’s not all that compared to some of the shows we have now,” stated another, in reply to someone pointing out the most problematic storylines.
What do you think?
