For a comedian, there’s no greater reward than a laugh. But when it comes down to it, it has to have the right timing. Part of that is up to the comedian themselves but so much also relies on the audience, who can easily break the rhythm if they’re giving too much back to the actor. And just like Phoebe Buffay had her smelly cat, Lisa Kudrow had plenty of rotten crowds while filming Friends.
Lisa Kudrow recently appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, where she touched on just how easily what the audience perceives as praise can turn into a disruption. “They were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny…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 go, ‘Come on’. Really angry.”
This would be the part of the article where you think, Friends wasn’t even funny to begin with – the audience was doing those guys a favor by laughing! But you have to remember just how big that show and its cast was at its peak. Those fans wanted to give everything they had when visiting Warner Bros. Studios. The problem, like Lisa Kudrow points out, is amplifying it to the point of irritation, as if they asked for one too many autographs and ruined the experience for the people they admire and themselves.
As a matter of fact, if Lisa Kudrow had her way, Friends would have barred a live audience and relied on 100% canned laughter. “A TV show is not for the studio audience. It is made for the TV viewers at home. That’s who we are in service to. If it was a stage play, yeah laugh as long as you want. I’ll figure out things to keep my character busy waiting to continue with it. That’s fine. It’s being filmed and now I’m just standing there…You do, like, nod, ‘Yeah, I said that.’ It’s terrible. They instructed our audience not to do anything like that, I think.”
Certainly Lisa Kudrow would have noticed this even more in recent times, as she started rewatching Friends as a way of paying tribute to her late co-star, Matthew Perry, who died in October last year. Kudrow is one of just two cast members – alongside Jennifer Aniston – to have won an Emmy for Friends, nabbing Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for season four.