We imagine that could be a bit off-putting alright!
Lisa Kudrow has revealed that the Friends' studio audience used to make her "really angry".
The actor recently appeared on Conan O'Brien's podcast Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend and told the host that she often grew irritated with the live studio audience while they were recording episodes of Friends.
“Because they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny. That’s why,” when Conan asked her why she found the studio audience annoying. “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," she added.
“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. That’s fine. 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.”
Lisa Kudrow also revealed more behind the scenes info on what it was really like to film Friends, stating that it could take 6-8 hours to record just one half hour episode and that they would do so many takes that the studio audience would eventually stop laughing from having heard a joke too many times.
But the writers were on set during the recordings and they felt if an audience was reacting well enough to a joke, they would rewrite lines on the spot and do even more takes.
“But it worked the first time!” Kudrow said. “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.”
You can watch Lisa Kudrow's full podcast episode with Conan O'Brien below 👇
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