Remember the feeling of watching Friends or Seinfeld and laughing out loud at something you almost couldn’t believe they just said? Lisa Kudrow remembers it too. And she thinks TV has quietly walked away from that kind of comedy.
Kudrow, 62, sat down with actress Lily Tomlin, 86, for a conversation published in Interview Magazine on March 30. Tomlin asked whether she thought the sitcom format was dying or just evolving. Kudrow’s answer was direct.
“I wish they were evolving,” she said. “30 Rock, Seinfeld, and Friends were really funny and really well written. But I’m not drawn to new sitcoms that are multi-camera in front of an audience because I’m not buying it.”
Comedy Is About Surprise
Kudrow didn’t stop there. She said the issue runs deeper than the camera setup. “I think we need to get back to being able to tell jokes,” she said. “I feel like we’ve been too afraid to make jokes that might make people uncomfortable.”
When Tomlin pointed out that multi-camera shows still have plenty of jokes, Kudrow agreed but drew a distinction. The really good ones, she said, land jokes that make you think, “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Comedy is about surprise,” she said. “You need things you didn’t see coming.”
That rings true for anyone who grew up with the great sitcoms of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Those shows were willing to go somewhere unexpected. That element of surprise was exactly what made you lean forward on the couch.
Phoebe Was Never a Ditz
Kudrow also looked back at her decade on Friends, which ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004. She played Phoebe Buffay alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, and Matthew Perry.
Back in 1994, viewers and critics often called Phoebe a “ditz.” Kudrow never saw it that way. “To me, she wasn’t,” she said in the Interview conversation. “Someone who wasn’t toeing the line”, that was her read on the character.
She also admitted it took time to find her footing with Phoebe. “At first, Phoebe was very, very far from me,” she said. But over ten years, something shifted. “A little bit of her came into me. I lightened up a little more and read some books on spirituality and things, just to try to understand her.”
The Comeback Is Back for the Last Time
Kudrow is back on television right now in The Comeback, which premiered its third and final season on HBO on March 22. She plays Valerie Charish, an actress navigating a changed Hollywood. The show’s first two seasons aired in 2005 and 2014.
She told The Hollywood Reporter why this season wraps things up for good. “I don’t know if I’ll want to do it again in 10 years, so let’s be done,” she said. “The most respectful thing we can do for the audience and for the character is make it a three-part story. It’s a trilogy, and this is the end.”
New episodes of The Comeback air Sundays at 10:30 p.m. ET on HBO.