Jerry Seinfeld Takes Jab at ‘Friends,’ Claims It Copied ‘Seinfeld’

Jerry Seinfeld took a shot at Friends while performing at the Netflix Is a Joke Festival earlier this week.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the comedian made the joke during his set Tuesday night at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. While speaking to the crowd, Seinfeld asked fans to guess his favorite television show. When someone in the audience shouted “Friends,” he responded with a theory about the hit NBC sitcom.

“My show [‘Seinfeld’] came on — ’89, ’90. ‘Friends’ came on a few years later,” he told the audience.

Seinfeld joked that NBC saw the success of his sitcom and decided to make something similar with a more attractive cast.

“I think NBC was watching my show and went, ‘Hey, this is working pretty well. Why don’t we try the same thing with good-looking people?’ And that was a pretty good idea. I think that kind of worked.”

Seinfeld first aired on NBC in 1989 and ran for nine seasons. The series starred Seinfeld alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards.

“Friends” premiered five years later in 1994 and stayed on the air for 10 seasons. The sitcom featured Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry.

Even though both shows followed groups of friends living in New York City, the style of each sitcom was very different. “Friends” focused more on relationships and emotional storylines, while “Seinfeld” became famous for being described as a “show about nothing.”

This is not the first time Seinfeld has connected himself to the success of “Friends.” In a 2022 interview with the Daily Beast, Lisa Kudrow shared a story about meeting Seinfeld at a party during the 1990s.

According to Kudrow, Seinfeld walked up to her and said, “you’re welcome,” because “Friends” aired right after “Seinfeld” on NBC’s schedule.

Kudrow recently spoke again about the sitcom during an interview with the Times of London. She revealed that the cast of “Friends” still earns around $20 million a year from residual payments more than 20 years after the show ended in 2004.

At the same time, Kudrow said working on the show was not always easy behind the scenes.

“There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes,” she said.

She explained that filming in front of a live audience created pressure on the actors, especially when scenes did not get the reaction writers wanted.

“Don’t forget we were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response, they could be like, ‘Can’t the bitch f–king read? She’s not even trying. She f–ed up my line,’” Kudrow recalled.

She also claimed that some members of the mostly male writers’ room would openly discuss sexual fantasies about Aniston and Cox during late-night conversations. Kudrow described the atmosphere at the time as “intense.”

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