At 20 years old, Friends was very much a product of its time: despite its unprecedented longevity, it is about as 90s as Tamagotchis and MSN Messenger (though impressively the writers swerved anything that would really date them in cultural terms), and part of that culture of sitcoms was the use of a laughter track. It still happens now of course, but the shows that rely on that sort of thing, rather than a studio audience (even a manipulated one) would never have survived as long as Friends did today. If you stop paying attention to the jokes and listen more closely to the laughter track, people are literally falling about in the aisles, clutching themselves to stop their organs bursting out. The reaction simply does not match the supposed trigger, and the show has succeeded in the long term precisely despite it. The writing was always strong enough, and the shows always funny enough to justify letting them breathe on their own, or having a real audience reaction in there instead, and even after multiple viewings of every single episode, it's hard to accept that anyone ever thought that canned laughter was ever a good idea.
