Jennifer Aniston says the ‘world needs humor’ as younger generation finds ‘Friends’ offensive

Aniston has been playing comedic roles since she stepped into Rachel Greene’s shoes on the 1994 mega-hit “Friends.” She quickly became a superstar, and in the decades since has been serving up the laughs in movies like the 2004 romantic comedy “Along Came Polly” and the 2013 romp “We’re the Millers,” in which she slayed as a stripper moonlighting as a soccer mom.

Aniston, ahead of the release of her latest Netflix movie, “Murder Mystery 2,” spoke with AFP (via Yahoo News) about the evolution of comedy.

“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,” Aniston said. “[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.”

“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of ‘Friends’ and find them offensive,” Aniston added. “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” has been catching flack for years about its lack of diversity and the offensive nature of some of its jokes.

A once-obese Monica Geller (played by Courteney Cox) is the butt of body-shaming jokes throughout the series, and her brother Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) faces a barrage of homophobic punchlines because his ex-wife left him for a woman. Bustle published a list of offensive “Friends” jokes in 2018; Cosmopolitan published a list of “shocking” jokes in 2017 that “Friends” couldn’t “get away with today.”

Series creator Marta Kauffman told the BBC in 2022 that she now regrets the representation of the character played by Kathleen Turner.

“We kept referring to her as Chandler’s father, even though Chandler’s father was trans,” she said. “Pronouns were not yet something that I understood. So we didn’t refer to that character as she. That was a mistake.”

Kauffman also addressed the show’s lack of diversity.

“I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years,” Kauffman told the L.A. Times’ Greg Braxton in 2022. “Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.

“It was after what happened to George Floyd that I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of. That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had participated. I knew then I needed to course-correct.”

Kauffman pledged $4 million to the Boston area’s Brandeis University to establish the Marta F. Kauffman ’78 Professorship in African and African American Studies, which supports “a distinguished scholar with a concentration in the study of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.”

Lisa Kudrow, who played ditzy masseuse and coffee-shop singer Phoebe Buffay, also retrospectively weighed in on the series in 2020, commenting on how different the show would be if it were made today.

“Oh, it’d be completely different,” Kudrow said. “It would not be an all-white cast … I’m not sure what else, but, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong,” she said. “Also, this show thought it was very progressive. There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together? We had surrogacy too. It was, at the time, progressive.”

Especially in the United States, where everyone is “far too divided,” we can’t “take ourselves too seriously,” Aniston told AFP.

“Everybody needs funny!” she added. “The world needs humor!”