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April 6, 2023

The woke mob goes after Jennifer Aniston and Friends

By Rajan Laad

The famous sitcom Friends is what one would regard as vanilla-flavored — it was enjoyable, inoffensive, sweet, and reliably entertaining.

The series made household names out of Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer.

It was almost as if the makers of Friends took the premise of Seinfeld; removed the edginess, the misanthropy, the darkness, and the realism (as real as they could be in a '90s sitcom); and replaced them with innocuous humor, drama, elements of a soap opera, and above all good-looking stars.  The soap opera element became more pronounced as the seasons went on, as the series attempted to engage audiences by romantically linking its principal characters.

I personally prefer Seinfeld, but there is no denying that Friends is still immensely enjoyable to watch when one is in the mood for lighthearted fun.

Friends has been dubbed in various languages and is still shown across the world.

It still garners a vast audience in reruns, despite the last episode of the series being broadcasted almost two decades ago.  This means fans from the old days are rewatching.

But it also means younger "woke" viewers are watching, and surprise, surprise: they're branding the series "problematic."

Recently, Jennifer Aniston (who played Rachel in the series) spoke out about the younger generations who find Friends problematic when watched through a modern lens.

She admitted that things have "evolved" since she began her career, but she lamented an added layer of "sensitivity" since her days on the show, which ran from 1994 until 2004.  From The Indian Express:

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.

Recently, Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman and executive producer David Bright made a pre-emptive apology before the mob, saying that their show lacked diversity and a politically correct sense of humor.

Kauffman even went as far as to apologize for the lack of Black actors on the show and pledged $4 million to the African and African American Studies program at Brandeis University.

Kauffman even apologized for misgendering the transgender parent of the character Chandler Bing, who was referred to as Bing's "father" on the show.

Kathleen Turner, who played the part of Chandler Bing's transgender parent on Friends, said she would not have taken the role if it were offered to her today.

Back to Jennifer Aniston...

She lamented that modern humor is constrained to the extent that it requires actors and comedians to "be very careful" when making jokes.  From Yahoo:

'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.' ...

'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.' ...

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

Aniston didn't slam any individual or group.  She merely acknowledged a problem and urged everyone to accept humor for its purpose — to make people laugh.

The irony is that the comment about people being perpetually offended ended up offending some.  Friends was slammed by the mob, and so was Aniston.

Some people claimed that Friends was a rip-off of the '90s sitcom Living Single, where all the principal characters were Black and single and living in New York.

Social media users compiled clips of the men in Friends making "inappropriate" remarks.

Some found it fatphobic and transphobic:

Some found it homophobic:

Some found it racist:

Some found it qualifying on all counts of bigotry:

Some attacked Aniston:

Some called the series just plain horrible:

Recently the Independent, BuzzFeed, Glamour, and ScreenRant carried pieces about younger audiences being offended by the series.

It is pointless going into the specifics of situations and characters and defending them because the mob will obviously find a way to be offended.

For instance, the pilot of Friends had a male character's wife leave him for a woman.  Perhaps it was stolen from Woody Allen's Manhattan, but they did show it.  The pilot also depicted a lesbian wedding.  The mob thinks the lesbians were used as objects of ridicule.

The hysteria is absolutely preposterous.

Every work of fiction is usually a reflection of its time.

It is pointless to hold Friends or anything other works of fiction from past eras to the standards of 2023.  It is futile to slam the series for failing to adhere to a level of discourse that didn't exist back then.

Beyond that, we have to remember that works of fiction will show all kinds of characters and all kinds of situations, and a depiction is not an endorsement.

Friends isn't a guide on propriety, but instead a sitcom.  Comedy often ridicules, mocks, overstates, and exploits insecurities, shortcomings, and differences.

I know people who turn to Friends whenever they are bored, annoyed, irked, or just feeling down.  They have watched each episode multiple times, such that they can recite the dialogue simultaneously with the actors, yet it doesn't stop them from watching it.  They even quote lines from Friends in their daily lives.  They relish quoting obscure lines in the hope that they are recognized by fellow fans.

A series that brings so much joy to so many people clearly got it right.

If we go down the road of finding and removing everything offensive, we will be left with a blank screen and a blank page — the "woke" left turns comedy to tragedy.

Image: John, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.

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