Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on NBC’s juggernaut sitcom Friends, has gone on record about the experience of recording the show in front of a live studio audience. And no, it’s not very pleasant. While talking to Conan O’Brien on the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Kudrow was clear on how irritating it could be when the audience laughed at inappropriate times.
As reported by Variety, Kudrow spilled the beans about a certain audience behavior in the studio where she played Buffay for 10 seasons, which contained about 20 episodes each. O’Brien asks why it was “irritating,” and she replies:
“Because they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny. That’s why. 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.”
Friends
- Release Date
- September 22, 1994
Kudrow continues:
“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.”
Considering each episode takes several hours and several takes of the same scene, the laughs would stop at some point. Kudrow confirms, however, that often, the writers mistook this lack of laughs for ineffective material, causing them to rewrite the scenes and dialogues.
But it worked the first time! 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 okay if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going.
The Legacy of One of Friends’ Most Underrated Characters
Phoebe Buffay was the free-spirited massage therapist and amateur musician who sang her heart out in Central Perk, and was kind enough to carry triplets for her brother when he and his partner had no other options to have children. Alongside Joey, Phoebe was often the comic relief in the first half of the show, but eventually, the writers gave her more material by making Phoebe a more consistent presence beyond her weird lifestyle and quirky attitude. Still, audiences would never forget her iconic rendition of the song “Smelly Cat.”
As it happens with the other characters in the show, nothing would have been possible without a good actor like Kudrow. Taken for a dumb and funny blonde at the beginning, Phoebe quickly adopted a character style that always carried some mystery. She was extremely funny, yes, but she was also someone very interesting that everyone would want to be friends with.
Friends
is available to stream on Max.