New generation too woke for classic comedy, according to Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston says kids who find Friends think it's offensive in this day and age
Aux News Jennifer Aniston
“Comedians can’t say anything nowadays” is such a typical thing for a comedian to say, it barely even registers anymore. But coming from the mouth of Jennifer Aniston, one of society’s most benign comic actors, it does come as a bit of a surprise. Sure, Jen’s been in the game long enough for her opinion to have some weight, but her comic stylings were never exactly controversial.
Nevertheless, “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,” Aniston tells AFP (via Yahoo News). “[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.”
That is quite sad to hear—mostly because it sounds like Aniston has missed out on Veep and Succession and American Auto, all funny shows about awful people doing bad things. (This is to say nothing of the stand up comedy scene.) Twitter, naturally, did not agree with Aniston’s remarks, particularly as they applied to her most famous comedy, Friends.
“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive,” the sitcom star claims. “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.”
Viewed through a modern lens, there are certainly aspects of Friends that have aged poorly. Truthfully, though, Friends doesn’t have that much cutting edge material (Ross’ lesbian ex-wife notwithstanding) to fall under the category of “cancelable,” and it is still enjoyed widely to this day. It was HBO Max’s most-watched program after its launch in 2020, and the 2021 reunion special was a veritable ratings smash. So perhaps comedy is not in as dire a state as Aniston contends.
The Murder Mystery 2 star does seem to be experiencing an entirely different comedy scene than the rest of us, as she laments to AFP the tragedy that fewer comedies are being made than there used to be. (The A.V. Club finds no data to back up this claim, but does have plenty of suggestions if Aniston needs a recommendation.) “Everybody needs funny,” the actor declares. “The world needs humor! We can’t take ourselves too seriously—especially in the United States. Everyone is far too divided.”
158 Comments
Friends was offensively unfunny back then too, Jen.
But no one told her it was going to be this way.
clapclapclapclapclap
Weird then that it was the most watched scripted show in human history when it aired.
Amazing that, with so very many contrary examples, people still somehow equate popularity with quality.
I’m 31 and I always find it odd when someone my age is hugely obsessed with Friends. I’ve seen it front to back and it has little to no staying power in my mind beyond the iconography of Ross/Rachel’s will they/wont they. I can’t remember any jokes except the Smelly Cat song and I think Paul Rudd was in the final season.
I’m a little older than you and am also a bit bewildered when I run into people who are obsessed with it. I have seen a few episodes here and there, and I’ve never once laughed. I’ve occasionally mentally registered something as funny but not enough for me to actually laugh at it or find it entertaining. It’s not even a matter of finding it offensive–it’s just not funny to me.
I do recall two show moments that made me actually laugh and both were Ross moments. PIVOT was one of them and the episode where he had his teeth whitened and was wearing leather pants and couldn’t get them back on after using the bathroom was the other.
I enjoyed the one where Ross was attracted to his cousin. His inner monologue was really funny. Thinking back, I guess the one edgy thing about Friends was the incest they’d occasionally sprinkled in.
This, yes! PIVOT is/was and forever shall be, hilarious!I’ll throw in the date with the girl with the apartment that was like a trash heap.
Paul Rudd aka the Real Kid Immortus.
The one bit of ‘Friends’ I remember finding genuinely funny was the Lightning Round trivia game Joey, Chandler, Rachel and Monica play to see who gets the good apartment, which of course gave us “Miss Chnandler Bong”.
Agree. Having watched a lot of the series when it aired, you could make some argument that the early seasons were quality (or certain episodes of the series were) but the later seasons were not very good and really drag down the whole series. The true reason for the shows popularity was early goodish episodes that hook you into the characters. So by the time the show’s quality really dropped you were invested.
Big Bang Theory was like this for me too. The first 3 or 4 seasons were really strong and you get invested, but it went on a few seasons too long and I feel like the quality dropped by a bit. I still enjoyed it, but I stuck through it more because of the cast than the writing. Same things with Friends. Having a strong cast can easily make the audience look over the quality of the dialogue and story
The most unfunny show to ever air, Big Bang Theory, was popular, too. It was also painfully bad.
I will give the Big Bang Theory credit for arranging the first ever meeting in real life between Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones (though ironically they’re never on screen together at the same time).
Yeah BBT is one of the only sitcoms that was not only unfunny but actually made me angry.
What part made you actually angry?
Basing almost all the humor on hurtful nerd tropes, basically half the ‘comedy’ in the couple episodes I watched were as funny as a jock bullying a nerd.
That’s the part that actually made me angry.
Funny you should say that since the nerds pretty much all were doing well in life.
Yep and all the ‘humor’ was ‘look at how nerdy these nerds are!’
What’s a comedy you’d point to as being sufficiently pro-nerd?
Lots of people like to watch crap, film at 11.
It was the Big Bang Theory of its time. Which was the Two and a Half Men of its time.
TBBT isn’t even remotely close to Friends in any kind of stature or number lmao
i bet these folks never bought a hootie and the blowfish album either!
Was it meant to be funny? It was? Oh.
This article proves that you can’t say anything these days. Also she didn’t say “woke”.
This response proves you can’t make fun of or disagree with dumb things people say these days.
1. Clearly you can, since she said it, and she hasn’t been executed or had her tongue cut out for it. Being allowed to say something doesn’t mean nobody else is allowed to tell you what you said is stupid and/or offensive.2. She didn’t have to say “woke” directly when she sounds like she cribbed her entire complaint fomrom Mr. Anti-Woke Desantis.
Is she trying to say it’s dangerous to mock bigots now because they are either heavily armed or Supreme Court Justices?
There used to be a style of mockery in the 90s and 00s especially where a show/movie would just play bigoted behavior for laughs. Just wind up a bigot and let them skitter around the room for a while. Some of that has aged just fine (It’s Always Sunny is a great example), some hasn’t (lots of gay panic, Friends, for example). As many have done before, she’s conflating “we’ve aged out of some things” with “you can’t do anything anymore.”
Sunny works because everyone hates the main characters and their lives are garbage. Them doing bad things has lasting consequences, so it got 15 seasons.
Thinking people shouldn’t be sensitive to offensive material is peak privilege.
People have different idea’s of what’s offensive.
classic comedywhat
Indeed. It was dumb fluff in the 1990s and it’s dumb fluff 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,” Hmm – a couple of things here. I don’t think “woke” stops you making fun of yourself, or of life. And the other thing is, being “very careful” in this context means having to think a bit and do something clever rather than reaching for an easy/offensive gag.
Seems she didn’t even say the word “woke”, it’s just in the headline.
That’s a fair point, although what she did say amounts to the same thing.
sure, seems fair to put words into her mouth that you assume she was thinking.
Whether it’s “woke” or “kids these days”—which IS what she actually said, paraphrased—it means the same thing: “I don’t like it that I can’t say what I used to say without consequences.” That’s what they ALWAYS mean when they say “we weren’t as sensitive Back Then.” Which, capitalization aside, is a DIRECT QUOTE.So yes, it absolutely IS “fair” to “put words in her mouth that you assume age is thinking” when the ENTIRE rest of her statement heavily implies it, because guess what? That’s how language WORKS!
hahaha wait so you think woke means the same as “kids these days”?
Yeah, this reminds me of people that still refer to today’s youth as “Millennials”. 2016 was a pretty long time ago at this point…most of the people that willingly self-identified as “woke” at the height of that cultural moment are now in their thirties or older. Then again, this person seems pretty angry and out of touch, so maybe take what they have to say with a grain of salt!
Well, why can’t comedians say what they want without consequences anymore? Is that really progress? To cater to the most sensitive people possible? Seinfeld won’t play colleges anymore, and his act is anodyne as hell. There’s still an audience for offensive shit, but when comedians like him and Mel Brooks (who says Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today) say things have changed, they have changed. And not for the better, IMO. I want another George Carlin.
I made the mistake of missing that the key word in the headline was not one she actually said. Which I’ve acknowledged. But the thrust of what she said doesn’t really depend on whether she said “woke” or not.
Yeah; when you isolate the quote from the AVClub writer interjecting with “she hates the woke!” she’s kinda just stating facts.
Wait a minute. These people aren’t friends. They aren’t friends at all!
Could they BE any less friendly?!
[unrelated observation about camels]
*capuchin in a little suit reaction take*
bad date . . .
this is extremely funny because there have been numerous articles about how gen z LOVES friends and it was one of netflix’s biggest watched shows amongst that demographic.
I’ve got this insanely broad paint brush sitting on my desk something tells me you’d like to use it!
Your frustration is clearly born out of nostalgic-love for the series so let me illustrate a point to you: I love the MCU. A lot of my generation is obsessed with the MCU and binge it and re-watch it to tatters…. now stay with me…
does that mean the MCU is consistently good or even good in general? Now think of Friends as the MCU. Just because its nostalgic to you doesn’t mean its more than canned laughter and white people.
And what’s crazy too is it doesn’t diminish you or your intelligence that you enjoyed it! So chill the hell out and stop acting like people are specifically attacking you by saying Friends was overhyped (it was, deal with it).
Do you need a nipple to go with that bottle of milk?
Just imagine if the original comment was two sentences.
i’m trying to figure out what i was frustrated about and why i need to think of friends as the mcu.
where the hell did you get, like, 90% of that from in the comment you’re replying to
90% seems low.
It’s called mental illness.
Look, he could either pay for his medication this month or only see Quantumania eighteen times and he made his choice. Didn’t work out for the rest of us, alas, but at least he got all the variants of the Limited Edition Marvel Pepsi cups the theatre was serving drinks in.
hey man think you may have misread what i was saying.i was just pointing out that friends on netflix was a huge hit with young people, so aniston’s point about a younger generation not being able to appreciate it rings false. personally i don’t really feel strongly about friends and i wasn’t saying anything about quality of the show, nor was i being attacked by anyone for that opinion or saying it was ‘overhyped’ (which is something i didn’t say or imply in any way), nor was i frustrated about anything, and to answer your question no i don’t need a nipple for my bottle of milk.
It’s cosmicghostrider, nothing they say ever makes any god damned sense.
What you have to remember is that cosmicghostrider is, at all times, responding to the slightly parallel comments section that exists in their own head. It bears a surface similarity to the comments section in this reality, but is its own, deeply deranged thing.
Three things you need to know about Cosmo:1) If you’re not talking about how great the MCU all the time, he will assume you hate the MCU. 2) Since he has built his entirely identity and existence around the MCU, an attack on the MCU is a personal attack on him (remember, not talking about the MCU counts as an attack). 3) He only understands things when the relate to the MCU, hence that extremely long, clumsy, angry simile he tried to do up there.
Wouldn’t say the poster is the one who needs to chill…
Sir this is an Arby’s
Honey. What.
What in the actual fuck is this? Touch grass, or go stand in the rain.
They do! They’re just also able to say “Oh wow, it’s kind of bananas that this show had this plot point.” Being critical of something doesn’t automatically mean throwing it away.Just like I can watch I Love Lucy and be like “Wow, it’s really weird that they weren’t allowed to say the word pregnant.”
they should never have been allowed to say pregnant on tv.
Comedy changes with the times. What was acceptable a long time ago isn’t acceptable now. That’s just how it goes.
Sigh, eyeroll. Still, did she even say the word “woke” or is that just clickbait?
She didn’t seem to have said the word directly, but it is VERY HEAVILY implied, by the fact that the entire rest of what she had to say is practically word for word a typical “anti-woke” complaint.
Jennifer Aniston said that society is now too woke for Friends. She didn’t use the word woke, but she used the definition of the word woke that the majority of Americans agree on and which 60% of Americans view positively. Focusing on the specific shibboleth “woke” as a derogatory is trying to seek out and identify members of the 35% of people who think staying woke is bad.But the headline’s right, there are no quotes in it, nothing to see here.That said, she’s half-right. She even identifies the problem as the ignorance and carelessness (actually cruelty to be honest) of the writers but steps too far in saying that they were tacking to the social norm.Friends had 30 million viewers at its peak. That’s a lot. The Superbowl had 90 million viewers every single season of Friends. It’s hard to see Friends as some barometer for social norms when it, at its absolutely most popular, is 33% the size of the Superbowl audience. And even harder when you realize it captured 25% of any audience tuning into television at that time. Very good economically, but when 75% of your potential audience doesn’t care that you exist it’s bizarre to pretend you represent their tastes too.
Feck outta heah, Jennifer. There’s edgy comedy everywhere, it remains popular and successful, and before you Say The Thing, yes, Blazing Saddles could indeed get made today.
See also Always Sunny. I have no idea where she gets the idea that Friends was edgy comedy. Maybe she’s confusing her show with Seinfeld.
not a good example as It’s Always Sunny removed several episodes that probably won’t ever see the light of day again.
From streaming. They are still available for purchase.
On some platforms, yes, on other platforms, no. They’ve pulled the same 6 episodes from iTunes for purchase.
Dang I wasnt aware of this. And I was just about to rewatch the series too!
But it would be gender and race flipped.
Blazing Saddles was remade. It was called Django Unchained.
Mel Brooks said it couldn’t be made today. I’ll take his word for it. Plenty of comedians have said they won’t work colleges anymore. There still is an audience for offensive humor, but there’s also a massive group of people who will flip out about it. The comedians are saying things have changed, and I’m not even talking about Aniston.
yes, Blazing Saddles could indeed get made today. Thank you! I’m so tired of that idea. Yes, it was way ahead of its time, yes it was and is “controversial”. But there’s plenty of edgy, offensive-to-some comedy nowadays. Sometimes they even use bad language!
Unsolicited advice for Jennifer Aniston: if someone asks you a question & you don’t know the answer, it is okay to just admit that
I’m gonna head back over to the baseball movie slide show to see if anyone has brought up how The Sandlot is problematic.
Have fun!
I wish you’d told me that before I gave someone advice on performing brain surgery!
I Love Lucy still makes me laugh, and I’ve recently found myself loving the Dick van Dyke show. Edgy based on current standards? Absolutely not. But good fundamentals.
Friends was bland when it was on and is blander now. It’s not a timeless classic. I’ve been making my partner watch NewsRadio and it’s held up very well being a contemporary of Friends.
I feel like the only reasons people talk about Friends was because it was such a big deal when it aired. Were there better shows, yes (News Radio is a classic for a reason); where there worse show, also yes. But like we’re not seeing the talk about shows like Veronica’s Closet, Just Shoot Me or Caroline in the City (for example) or even something like the Drew Carey Show like we do for Friends simply because they weren’t as popular. Like most things people are going to check out things with name recognition.
Which is weird because I watched Veronica’s Closet, Just Shoot Me, and even Caroline in the City and the Drew Carey Show but I couldn’t be f’ed to turn on “Racebent Living Single.”
There are also things said and done (or not said and done) on I Love Lucy that I can look at critically and say “wow, that was a choice” while still enjoying the show.That’s the same thing Gen Z does with Friends – given Friends is one of the most popular shows with high school and college students right now.
Newsradio had a bunch of better actors, for one.Nobody on Friends could hold a candle to Hartman, although that might be too high a bar for anybody to leap.
Nobody on Friends could hold a candle to Hartman True – but in my opinion no one on Friends could hold a candle to any cast member of News Radio. Each cast member was at their peak on that show. Some of them, like Stephen Root of course (not Joe Rogan and Andy Dick) have gone on to do great work, but man oh man.
Stephen Root is simply amazing in everything i’ve ever seen him in, and given his humongous career, that is a LOT of stuff.Edit: Andy Dick, POS that he is, was also at his absolute peak, although that isn’t saying a lot.
Counterpoint: Friends didn’t give Andy Dick employment and thus money.
Dick van Dyke show. Edgy based on current standards? The episode “That’s my Boy!” was pretty edgy back then. It might not be if it was done today, but maybe. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but it’s damn funny.
the dick van dyke show had some moments that were absolutely controversial for the time, but for good reasons.
Way to lean all the way in to wrong direction! So about a month back SNL took a break for a couple weeks and so they aired re-runs from the early 2000s. One of the ones I caught my Dad watching was hosted by Jennifer Aniston and I guess this was during the Friends popularity. The first “joke” Aniston made was how we all know that Ross Gellar must be gay.
There’s also a scene on Friends where here character Rachel does an offensive Indian accent so I mean. Her hair is still good but the talking doesn’t seem to work right with this one.
I’ve never seen her with a hair out of place.
Honestly, the main issue with the series was mainly the gay panic for laughs. How the show treated Chandler for not being a “macho man” was bad even back then. The only other problem I remember is Rachael dating her assistant. It was inappropriate back then too but for some reason that type of power dynamic was big in the early 2000’s (like the numerous shows with a guy dating his teacher). The funny part is Seinfeld did it better as the take away was how inappropriate that was (plus it was like 2 episodes not a whole running plot). The real takeaway should be, if you’re going to watch a 90’s sitcom choose Seinfeld.
Weren’t they on back-to-back?
8 and 9 with some short lived (usually) filler in the middle.
oh right.
I think there’s a lack of diversity too.
Ross also dates a student for a while while he was working as a professor, which was acknowledged in the show as being sketchy as hell but still probably not something they’d casually throw in a show today.
It’s kind of odd that Aniston correctly notes that there are several things where “we should have thought it through” but she writes off a whole generation as writing off the whole show, which simply isn’t accurate.
The more I isolate the quotes from the article the more it sounds like she’s just clumsily acknowledging things changing and the article is running headlong into “darn woke kids get off my lawn” territory.
I read about this first on an actual news source that just reported the facts, and it still came across as Aniston doing a “get off my lawn” thing. That she seems pretty out of touch are due to the words coming out of her mouth.
I’m sure there may be little drips and drabs that haven’t aged well, but I always felt like Ross’ gay ex-girlfriend (wife?) was portrayed like a quasi-villain. Like, not only was she the one that did him dirty by leaving him for – *gasp* – a woman, but pretty much every time she and her partner were on screen they were kinda assholes… always rolling their eyes and annoyed at whatever was going on.I was channel surfing in the hotel earlier this month and watched a little bit of Friends that kinda reinforced this – in the scene, Ross was fawning over his son saying his first words, and the lesbian couple are pressing him to hurry up so they can leave. I get that they are kind of a storytelling convenience device – they basically show up whenever the storytellers don’t want Ross to have to deal with the kid, but it’s always kind of been a bad look.
I’m sure there may be little drips and drabs that haven’t aged well, but I always felt like Ross’ gay ex-girlfriend (wife?) was portrayed like a quasi-villain. Like, not only was she the one that did him dirty by leaving him for – *gasp* – a woman, but pretty much every time she and her partner were on screen they were kinda assholes… always rolling their eyes and annoyed at whatever was going on.Honestly, this sounds like the correct reaction to most of the stuff in the show.
Well, she did fucking cheat. And the new girlfriend/wife was a total bitch to Ross most of the time.
On the other hand, that show is one of the first representations of an actual gay wedding on main TV. And Ross walked his ex-wife down the aisle at her second wedding, which seems a bit above and beyond.
Actually my take was that Susan largely came across well. Her partner was sometimes antagonistic to Ross but that’s typical of a second partner, regardless of gender or sexuality. And for the most part Ross was the butt of any jokes involving the three of them. By the standards of the time, I thought it was pretty progressive.
And just to give this far more thought than it really deserves: I have to imagine that Susan’s partner (Carol) knows a lot more about her marriage with Ross than the rest of the gang (or the audience) does, and that could well be the main reason why they don’t get along. Ross’s first marriage is almost never discussed on the show, and we’re mostly left to assume that it was just Susan’s sexuality that broke them up. But Ross’s other romantic relationships are trainwrecks too, not excluding his love match with Rachel, so I am not at all surprised that Carol, who loves Susan, doesn’t like her kind-of-a-feckless-dipshit ex very much.
I think the proper way to frame this is that Carol’s reactions are, in fact, representative of how an average person in the real world would interact with Ross, and that it’s the rest of the main characters who are acting unreasonably by continuing to hang out with him.
Just your stereotypical “hard-to-please lesbians”
Seinfeld is surprisingly unproblematic. Anytime it deals with dicey stuff from a 2023 perspective, it’s almost always one of the main characters that is the butt of the joke. Like when Elaine thinks she’s dating a Black guy, or the several times when George is afraid of seeming gay. The worst thing I can recall is those two stereotypically gay dudes who steal the armoire from Kramer (IIRC?)—the joke seems to be “Kramer is physically threatened by some GAYS?? lol” which is quite bad, but I think was the only thing that made me cringe on my last rewatch.
That’s honestly one of the things that makes Seinfeld stand the test of time. That and it’s still a very funny show.
I keep trying with Seinfeld but I just don’t get it. I’m sure there’s a big nostalgia bias, but I’m onto Season 5 of Seinfeld and only just starting finding it moderately funny. Whereas I watched Friends from the start and can watch it now and still laugh a lot.
i think that could also be read as ‘we’re subverting stereotypes and the gay people are street toughs’ which is…differently problematic, of course, but at least an interesting choice.
To this day, I still find myself sometimes yelling in a Spanish voice ‘Who, does not want to wear thee ribbon!”
I’m not sure if ‘Seinfeld’ ever went as far as dropping the word “privilege”, but the writing very much acknowledged that these were people who could spend their lives obsessing over the minutiae of life because they didn’t have many real problems to face. And that meant when they did brush up against issues like race or sexuality, they were shown to be largely clueless and overly performative. It helps that you also weren’t meant to like the main characters, unlike ‘Friends’ where they were supposed to be sympathetic.
To me the humor in that scene came from the fact that the “hardened criminals” that stole the armoire were in fact an urbane couple, complete with typical “couple out furniture shopping” dialogue. I personally think the joke works* regardless of the sexuality of the characters involved.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be critical though – just offering my own interpretation.
*Besides the fact that I have now explained the joke and therefore deprived it of any semblance of humor, sorry.
I’ve got your back on the Seinfeld point. I work with a wide spread of ages at my office (23 fresh out of school to Boomers on their way out) and none of them have an issue with Seinfeld. When you boil it down, Seinfeld just did it better and it has aged better. They had jokes and whole episodes that referenced body shaming, gay panic, ethnic stereotypes, and the core four’s overall selfish behavior. Hell, there was a whole plot point about Mel Torme thinking Kramer has a mental disability and taking him to a charity benefit!Artists claiming wokeness is why their art isn’t as respected as it once was are in denial that it was never that great to begin with.
Seinfeld has said he won’t play colleges anymore, because the audiences are so sensitive. And his act is as anodyne as possible. Other comics agree. Mel Brooks says Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. These are not untalented people. There’s still an audience for offensive shit, but the comedians are saying something has changed as well. Hell, are we really going to pretend things haven’t? There are people in this thread talking about problematic shit from Friends, and that show is harmless.
Casting a woman to play his trans father was also a choice that doesn’t hold up super well.
agreed, but that’s still a thing in 2023. at least she wasn’t a serial killer, which was the style at the time.
Et tu, Rachel?
You know, Shakespeare is really problematic. You’d never get away with that stuff today.
Don’t tell anybody, but people have been rewriting Shakespeare for centuries all the time. (But the people who would complain about it aren’t reading Shakespeare anyway.)
They won’t hear it from me.
Cancelled for biting my thumb at ye.
Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply cancel the other five?
Should have been “wokest friend,” but I’ll allow it.
But that would muddy the reference…
Because this concept of “cancel” confuses and infuriates us!
…she laments to AFP the tragedy that fewer comedies are being made than there used to be.
Comedies are still being made but they’re, generally, not funny or just dick, fart and dope jokes. Also, just because no one is pursuing you to be in their “comedy” doesn’t mean they aren’t being produced.
….yyyyeaaaaaah….they weren’t very funny “back then,” either, and largely just dick and fart jokes. Seriously, SHAKESPEARE was writing dick jokes, it’s pretty much a staple of comedy throughtout human history, possibly because dicks are ridiculous.
I’m still baffled when I see Aniston in a comedic film because she never had much of a career in movies outside of serious award-winning dramas.
And yet somehow Seinfeld still holds up. I guess being actually funny makes a difference.
TIL that Jennifer Aniston considers herself a comedian.
She’s got fantastic comedic acting timing, but yeah, “comedian”? I don’t see that.
Yeah I’m not trying to take away from her acting skills but I definitely consider “actors who act in comedies” to be different from “comedians.” Does she even write jokes?
I’m going to assume every comment here is some variation of “Friends wasn’t even funny in the 90s”
It’s like older comedic actors either do something egregious and deserve to be “cancelled” (Louis CK) or can’t find work and assume it’s because of “wokeness”. When they complain like this it hurts their chances that anyone wants to work with them.
Jennifer Aniston is 54 years old. The reason she’s not in more stuff isn’t because Hollywood got woke, it’s because Hollywood is sexist and ageist.
Exactly, my point is that it isn’t about being cancelled because of so called wokeness, it’s some other reason. Jim Breuer and Rob Schneider are some other examples.
I also think Jennifer Aniston can find any work she wants to be honest. She chose to make some real clunkers of movies, but I don’t think that actually impaired her ability to get work. I think she likes doing big ensemble comedies and joining Adam Sandler’s vacation tour of Netflix films.Some of her smaller work in the last 10 years has also been very good – Cake and Dumplin’ were both pretty good showcases for her.
“you have to be very careful”Yeah, and? So you can’t just reach for the same easy jokes based on stereotypes to punch down on convenient targets. That’s the problem? Culture evolves. Faster than media can keep up with it. Just because you can’t (or shouldn’t) say everything doesn’t mean you can’t say anything. With that said, there is clearly a problem. Comedians on both sides of the “cancel culture” divide have been saying for years that comedy is in a bad place. Studios and networks are definitely too scared to greenlight things that might give them negative PR. And the franchising of everything has made it far more profitable to pump out another boring superhero movie than to craft an original, funny comedy.As far as Frinds. I watched it back in the day. It was fine. I certainly wouldn’t go back and watch it the way I do Seinfeld or whatever. But I get if people like it. Or don’t like it. But I really hate this new attitude that if something is popular or makes a lot of money that automatically makes it good. Remember when you would bond with like-minded people over something like Conan in the 90s or Arrested Development or Wet Hot American Summer before those things got popular again years later? Now it seems like the only thing that matters to people is if the thing made a ton of cash. As if that’s any metric of quality for any art.
Friends was always offensive. People at the time said it was offensive. The only difference is that the suburban white kids grew up, went out into the world, and realized, “Holy crap… this show is just a homophobic/transphobic rip-off of Living Single with the races swapped so black people wouldn’t scare us off!”
Friends is still popular today.
Friends was always offensive. People at the time said it was offensive. Counterpoint: No and also, No.
“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.”Oh, look, she came so close to getting it only to undercut the actual point.The thing is both The Office and Friends are stupidly popular with current high school and college students. Those people are also able to look at it slightly more objectively and be like “wow! I can’t believe they made that choice” while also recognizing it was a different time.It’s almost like people – even young people – are capable of complex thought. I was a HUGE Friends fan. That doesn’t mean that rewatching it now there aren’t things that make me go “Oh…that was a choice.”
Pfft. Seinfeld was far more edgy than Friends ever had a prayer of being, and it hasn’t been cancelled (in syndication).Al Bundy is still streamed everywhere. Heck the channel that shows a lot of LGBTQ+ shows, “LogoTV”, has a full day marathon of MWC every Saturday.Sounds like Jen is trying to stir up controversy to remain relevant.
I miss the 70’s humor. Anything went as long as everyone was in on the joke.
You know, I don’t think anyone would mind if you stopped reporting on every single time a comedy-adjacent celebrity says this exact same thing. It’s not newsworthy, or even interesting. Congratulations on resisting the urge to pad out this story by embedding a bunch of defensive tweets, though!
Things have certainly changed since Aniston did her edgy comedy, dressed up in that iconic red leather jacket.
Christ this place has the worst commenters.
I disliked that show immensely but only because I just didn’t like any of the characters. That being said, cancel her!