Jennifer Aniston: Kids today find Friends ‘offensive’

ByJasmime Kaur

March 31, 2023

Jennifer Aniston recently spoke up about how difficult it is to do comedy these days that even a show like Friends can be seen as offensive.

She says it has become challenging to make fun of life and people are more sensitive.

“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.

“[In the past] 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.”

Friends which was hugely popular, ran between 1994 and 2004 and was a comedy about the lives of six friends in New York. Aniston said today the show would not go down so well with many people.

“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive. 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.

Friends Not So Funny Today

“Everybody needs funny! The world needs humor! We can’t take ourselves too seriously. Especially in the United States. Everyone is far too divided.”

Friends has also been called out for lack of diversity as all the main characters on the show were white.

The show’s co creator Marta Kauffman said last July that she felt so guilty about the lack of diversity in a show that she had created that she donated $4 million to create the Marta F Kauffman 78 Professorship in African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. The programme “will support a distinguished scholar with a concentration in the study of peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.”

Aniston shot to super stardom in the series playing the role of the sweet and somewhat self centered Rachel Green for which she also won an Emmy award.