“It wasn’t that funny”: the one thing that always annoyed Lisa Kudrow about ‘Friends’
Lisa Kudrow has enjoyed a glittering career on the big and small screen. In her youth, she appeared in cult hits like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion and Clockwatchers. As she’s gotten older, she’s found a new niche playing embarrassing parents or authority figures, as exemplified by Booksmart and Easy A. But come on. None of you are here for that. You’re all here for Friends.
As I’m sure you don’t need reminding, Kudrow played the erratic hippie Phoebe Buffay on the hit NBC sitcom. Across ten seasons of the show, she and the rest of the cast – including the late Matthew Perry – went from relative nobodies to the most famous people on the planet. The series is still finding new fans to this day, over 20 years after its finale ended. Kudrow could win an Oscar, land on the moon, and find a cure for cancer, and she’d still be best known for singing ‘Smelly Cat’.
Unlike other sitcoms, Friends didn’t use a laugh track, but rather was filmed in front of a live studio audience. With the exception of special episodes that were filmed on location or outside of the US, most episodes of the show were taped at Stage 24 on the Warner Bros lot, which has since been renamed ‘The Friends Stage’. It took about six hours to film each 22-minute episode, and the audience in attendance was kept entertained by a stand-up comedian in between filming.
You will meet a lot of people who cannot stand canned laughter on sitcoms, myself included. The live audience on Friends makes it feel more natural, as you can tell there are actual humans laughing at the jokes instead of some bloke pressing a button.
Producer Kevin S Bright was a vocal advocate for this feature, but others weren’t so keen on it – speaking to the titular host of the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast, Kudrow revealed that she was always irritated by the live audience, especially when she felt like they were laughing too much.
“It wasn’t that funny,” she said. “It wasn’t an honest response, and it irritated me… Now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show. There are other lines… Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and sometimes I would just look out and go, ‘Come on.’ Really angry.”
The Emmy winner went on to explain that a live audience clashed with her perception of working on a TV show. “If it were a stage play, yeah, laugh as long as you want,” she continued. “But then it’s being filmed, and now I’m just sort of standing there. And then you do things that you hate, just like nod, ‘Yeah, I said that.’ It’s terrible.”
Kudrow has never been one to keep quiet about things she doesn’t like, even when it concerns her biggest meal ticket. As warm as it made the show feel to viewers at home, the live audience must have had a discomforting impact on the actors.
Even after ten seasons and over 200 episodes, it’s obvious that she never quite got used to it.
