Lisa Kudrow Clarifies That She Didn’t Hate It When the Audience Laughed During ‘Friends’ Tapings

There’s been a lot of talk about Friends recently, partly due to the tragic passing of Matthew Perry, partly owing to the fact that it’s celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and partly because the show has finally been immortalized in donut form.

So when Jennifer Aniston sat down with Abbott Elementary’s Quinta Brunson for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” interview series last month, naturally the topic of Friends came up. Specifically, Brunson praised the cast’s comedic rhythm, which she noted was unusual for a multi-camera sitcom. “People are clapping and laughing, but you guys aren’t waiting for the clap or laugh. Or it doesn’t feel that way to the viewer,” Brunson told Aniston, who she hailed as her “comedy queen.”

“Lisa Kudrow, by the way, hated when the audience laughed,” Aniston responded. “She’d be like, ‘I’m not done! It’s not that funny!” Which seems like a pretty big problem to have if you’re the star of a hugely popular situation comedy. 

During a promotional interview for the new Time Bandits show,  Entertainment Tonight asked Kudrow about Aniston’s comment. The actress behind Phoebe Buffay clarified that her problem wasn’t with the audience’s laughter, exactly, it was more to do with the duration of the laughs. “No, no. It irritated me if they would laugh for too long,” Kudrow told ET. “God bless them. They were so excited to be there that sometimes the laughter would just be longer than if they would have laughed at anything else. I was like, ‘All right, well, take it easy. It’s not that funny. And there’s more to say!’”

It’s true, the laughs did sometimes go on for quite a while. Watching YouTube videos of the show with the laugh track removed, the scenes are full of painfully awkward silences, implying that the Friends gang is, say, deeply uncomfortable with Phoebe informing them of her husband’s gastrointestinal struggles. 

Part of the reason why the show had such distractingly huge laughs is because its production was essentially engineered to get the best reaction possible. According to I’ll Be There for You: The One About Friends by Kelsey Miller, it was standard operating procedure for the writers to huddle together and rewrite a line “on the spot” if a joke didn’t get the “expected laugh.”

Cast members even delivered multiple line readings, with the one that “landed best” making the final cut. All of this meant that show nights occasionally went to as late as one or two in the morning, which “sometimes required swapping out one sleepy audience for a fresh one halfway through.”

So one can understand why Kudrow was a tad bothered when laughter affected her comic timing. Presumably they had the opposite problem on According to Jim. 

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