Criticising body shaming in Friends TV show is not ‘political correctness gone mad’

There is a collective of people out there in the world who keep a fastidious watch on ‘when things have gone too far’.

These are the folk who monitor what I imagine to be a big red arrow pointer on a chart of ‘political correctness has gone too far’ that shifts to ‘political correctness gone mad’ depending on the event.

We don’t know how they decide because they don’t release an annual report of their metrics.

But there seems to be a continuing trend correlating between moving on ideologically from things we used to find acceptable (fat jokes, sexism, casual racism, skinny jeans) to seeing this as evidence that the world is indeed going to the dogs because “young people are far too sensitive”.

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The latest is Gen Z (and lots of others) critically analysing the TV show Friends and picking up on some things in the show which might have got a laugh at the time but seem a bit problematic now.

Insightful, balanced explanations on TikTok have been popping up about how the constant fat “jokes” and body shaming of one character reflected the diet cultures of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The era when we thought Bridget Jones, who in the first book is only 9 stone at her heaviest, was “big” and we were encouraged to replace most daily nutritious meals with a bowl of Special K as a healthy way to lose weight.

“Is it any wonder we were all demented?” comedian Julie Jay says in her one-woman 2000s lookback show Oops, This is Toxic.

However there is one person who doesn’t agree: Friends star and haircut influencer Jennifer Aniston said “There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and who find them offensive ... I don’t think there was a sensitivity like there is now.”

There is an entire genre of documentaries from Pamela Anderson’s to Paris Hilton to the Spice Girls about how awful we all were to woman celebrities in the 2000s when at the time we thought we were progressive

This is in stark contrast to co-creator Marta Kauffman who said she “admitted and accepted” guilt over a whole lot of things she would probably change if the series was made now.

Things like having an all-white cast, jokes about homosexuality that borderline homophobia and trans jokes.

Kauffman didn’t have a crystal ball when she made the show and we can’t always know where our personal moral compasses and ignorances are going to shift in 25 years.

I’m sure most people held views, languages or practices two decades ago they would be ashamed to have now. We make amends, we vow to do better.

There is an entire genre of documentaries, from Pamela Anderson’s to Paris Hilton to the Spice Girls, about how awful we all were to woman celebrities in the 1990s and 2000s when at the time we thought we were progressive.

Aniston said today’s world “makes it really hard for comedians because the beauty of comedy is that we make fun of ourselves”.

Except in the case of Friends it was not a trans person making the jokes about themselves and it was a conventionally thin actor in a fat suit who was the butt of the jokes. They punched down not up.

Older generations did it when watching old reruns of James Bond in which Sean Connery seemed to belt the shite of women in various exotic locations.

There’s also a good chance not everyone found those jokes funny the first time around but didn’t have the language or the confidence to express why they felt they were off, in a society that said they were okay to make in the first place.

This generation is just like any other generation, looking at texts from the past and saying “Christ what a different time and place that must have been”.

Older generations did it when watching old reruns of James Bond in which Sean Connery seemed to belt the shite of women in various exotic locations.

This is nothing new.

Powerful and wealthy comedians like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Louis CK have claimed that they have been silenced. That woke culture means “you can’t say anything these days” except you can, but you’re not guaranteed a laugh in return.

The rest of us can only wish we had the confidence to blame our poor work performance on “wokeness” instead of asking, just maybe, could we have done a better job in the first place?