Friends star Lisa Kudrow reveals why she got "really angry" at laughing studio audience
It wasn't all fun and games during filming.
Friends star Lisa Kudrow has revealed that she would sometimes get "angry" with the show's live studio audience for laughing for "too long" during the filming of episodes.
The actor, who played Phoebe Buffay on the beloved sitcom, discussed her frustration on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast, explaining to the former Late Night host how excessive reactions posed a challenge for the cast and crew.
"It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me," she said. "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."
While a studio sitcom like Friends has laughter breaks built into the script, the length of some reactions necessitated even longer unnatural pauses from the cast and risked spoiling the viewing experience for those watching on television.
"A TV show is not for the studio audience," Kudrow continued. "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.
"[But] 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."
The matter of pacing would have been particularly sensitive given the strict runtimes of the US broadcast television, where sitcoms typically have a hard ceiling of 22 minutes in length.
But Kudrow explained that the studio audience also presented the opposite problem, as their laughs would decrease as the show repeated scenes for different takes, which would sometimes send the writers into panic about the quality of the jokes.
"But it worked the first time!" Kudrow wanted to assure them. "All I knew is you’re going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is. Who is suffering because they’re not laughing?
"I am OK if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going."
Friends ran for a decade on US broadcaster NBC and remains a popular streaming choice on Netflix in the UK.
The cast reunited in 2021 for a retrospective special, which proved to be the final screen appearance of Matthew Perry, who died late last year.
Kudrow recently revealed she had started rewatching the sitcom to honour his memory. The Phoebe actor is currently starring in fantasy adventure series Time Bandits on Apple TV+.
Friends is available to stream on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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Authors
David Craig is the Senior Drama Writer for Radio Times, covering the latest and greatest scripted drama and comedy across television and streaming. Previously, he worked at Starburst Magazine, presented The Winter King Podcast for ITVX and studied Journalism at the University of Sheffield.
