“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.”
Aniston concluded: “Everybody needs funny! The world needs humor! We can’t take ourselves too seriously. Especially in the United States. Everyone is far too divided.”
“Friends” has been called out in recent years for its lack of diversity. Cast member Lisa Kudrow once made headlines for saying if the show ever returned or got rebooted “it would not be an all-white cast.” Speaking to The Daily Beast last year, Kudrow made sense of the show’s lack of diversity by saying “Friends” creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman had “no business” telling stories about people of color given their own backgrounds.
“Well, I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college,” Kudrow said. “And for shows especially, when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color.”
Across 10 seasons and 236 episodes, all six major characters on “Friends” were Caucasian, and the show rarely featured performers of color in important parts. Lauren Tom, Gabrielle Union, Mark Consuelos, and Craig Robinson all appeared in small supporting parts on the show, while Aisha Tyler, the series’ most famous actor of color, only appeared in nine episodes.
Kauffman revealed in July that she was so “embarrassed” and “guilty” about the absence of diversity on “Friends” that she gave $4 million to Brandeis University to establish the Marta F. Kauffman ’78 Professorship in African and African American Studies. The program will “support a distinguished scholar with a concentration in the study of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.” “Murder Mystery 2,” featuring Aniston and Adam Sandler, will be available on Netflix on March 31.