Jennifer Aniston says ‘Friends’ offensive to ‘a whole generation of kids’

Jennifer Aniston, who has been working in film and comedy for nearly three decades, said it's become "a little tricky" to produce comedies because you have to be "very careful."

It’s The One With the Brutally Honest Actor: Friends star Jennifer Aniston is the latest celebrity to discuss the difficulties of working in comedy and making modern, apparently more sensitive audiences laugh.

Aniston, who has been working in film and comedy for nearly three decades, told the French news agency AFP that it’s become “a little tricky” to produce comedies because you have to be “very careful.” She said this is especially troubling because “the beauty of comedy is that we make fun of ourselves, make fun of life.”

Aniston, 54, lamented the past when she said: “You could joke about a bigot and have a laugh — that was hysterical. And it was about educating people on how ridiculous people were.”

She used her role as Rachel Green in the 1990s sitcom Friends as an example of how audiences have evolved over the years.

“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive,” she said.

Aniston blamed the offensiveness on a combination of “things that were never intentional” and elements of the program that just lacked thought.

Friends, a comedy about six young people in New York, has long since been criticized for a lack of diversity. All of the show’s main characters are white. While actors of colour appeared sparsely in short cameo roles, the most prominent, non-white actor on the show, Aisha Tyler (who played Charlie Wheeler), appeared in only nine episodes.

Some of the jokes in friends have also been labelled transphobic or homophobic.