this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Ok, ill reframe. What horrible comments were made in friends?
Pretty much any joke about Ross's ex wife begins and ends at "lol lesbian"
Yeah? It's pretty funny that the vaguely religious character that really care what his Jewish parents think of him marrying a bisexual. I don't find it mean spirited or anything. Especially given the time it was released. If anything it brought knowledge to people that had never met or seen a gay person.
I remember a commentary track from the DVDs where the creators of the show said there were two words that ALWAYS got a laugh from the studio audience: Nipple, and Lesbian. I think the same commentary track they talked about how they were allowed to say "penis" for the first few seasons of the show, then they weren't allowed, then they were allowed again.
Might be because Americans are so prude repressing everything connected with sexuality that they bashful laugh when hearing these words.
I mean, let's be real here. Nipples are funny and male nipples are hilarious.
As for "lesbian"...Ross being a sad sack because his wife left him for another woman is one of the very first character details the show establishes. It happens right at the 2 minute mark of the pilot episode, before any of the main cast's names are spoken and before Rachel even appears on screen. So, to the audience of Friends, the word "lesbian" is almost always spoken in a context of kicking Ross in the stomach again, especially when it comes out of his mouth. Not because lesbian funny or lesbian bad, but because lesbian = his first divorce. If she'd joined a convent the word "nun" would have played similarly.
The harshest I can think of is probably "Hello, Charles" or "Don't you have too much penis to be wearing a dress like that?" Both spoken by Chandler's mother to Chandler's father.
I don't think a prime time sitcom writer's room in 1996 had the vocabulary to articulate what they were trying to do. Chandler's father is referred to in dialog for most of the show as a "gay drag queen" whose antics were 1. played for laughs, 2. given as a source of trauma for Chandler which was 3. also played for laughs. When we finally meet this character, we find "Helena Handbasket" played by Kathleen Turner. The depiction rests somewhere between drag queen and trans woman written by writers who may not have known the difference.
Most of the actual jokes are at the expense of the awkwardness of the straight folks, like Monica trying and failing to find the right pronouns for the waitstaff at the drag show, or Monica's father outright asking Chandler's mother if she was his mother or father, saying "I've never seen one before!" and lamenting "I didn't even get a chance to act like I was okay with it." So we've got a homophobe/transphobe who is at least self aware and trying very badly to work around it as the butt of the joke.
But Chandler's parents interacting with each other is outright nastiness. "He" slutshames her, she deadnames "him", the audience laughs at each salvo...thing is, it's something of an echo of Ross and Carol. Both Ross and Nora find themselves divorced and raising a child in a broken home after their spouses and coparents come out as LGBTQ. That's hard and that's painful. We see it happen in real time with Ross and Carol, that it's very painful for Ross and rather uncomfortable for Carol. Ross loves the woman he married and wants to remain married to her; Carol doesn't dislike Ross, I think she still loves him, but isn't sexually attracted to him anymore if she ever was, so the marriage can't stand. It sucks and it hurts. With Chandler's parents, simply being in each other's presence is reopening those old wounds, and they lash out at each other.
I guess thats the one episode mentioned in the meme. I just became baffled by the example of friends being guilty of some crime against decency, about 25 years after the fact. I wonder if you are gonna look back at the things you like now and cringe in 25 years.
fucking so so many, mostly surrounding chandler (which can be funny rarely if you can find the funny side of stereotyping in the 90s) and his mum (which are not even close to anything but transphobic 100% of the time)
I don't know. I thought they were pretty funny.
I also found it hilarious that Lisa kudrow read the script for Chandler and thought "oh, how nice! They wrote a gay character!"