I dunno about this.

"this homophobia tends to avoid provoking either aversion or anger, and instead prompts the viewer to be swept away by the hilarity of the situations."
If there's no anger, no aversion... then it's just the same as any other comedy. You wouldn't call Married with Children marriage-phobic because it takes awkward situations to their comedic limits. It seems like the majority of the humour related to homosexuality in the show was just about comedic misunderstandings, which is a really common theme in sitcoms. It's inclusive, not phobic, to bring in the dynamics of a homosexual-tolerant society into that theme. It normalizes homosexuality, making it just another part of life, with all the humour of any other part.

Interesting as example of ‘soft homophobia’, especially the ways of being incorrectly identified as gay is seen as something so problematic. However, some of the jokes regarding the ex-wife being a lesbian  I think are a bit unfair in their inclusion – the show deserves credit for having a storyline where a gay couple could get married and raise a  kid successfully, and was ahead of its time in this sense. No one would have enjoyed this plot in a comedy if it was dealt with as plain drama, and while the humour does sometimes rely on stereotypes its seems more to be concerned with the character of Ross dealing with socialised view of him being emasculated, the struggles of dealing with a uncommon family structure, and wider views that lesbians are innately sexual (views expressed by what are seen to be the more immature male characters) while the couple itself wasn’t depicted in a sexualised way at all.
I think the fact that there are these jokes at least mean that homosexuality (and issues such as marriage and adoption) was being discussed, which can only be a good thing, even if it isn’t 100% politically correct .

Yes and no.

Some of the jokes in the video do rely on homophobia; others rely on shifting gender roles and social policing of traditional masculinity and femininity; others -- such as Phoebe sarcastically reassuring Chandler that he has "homosexual hair" -- are outright deconstructions of common perceptions of gender and sexuality.  It seems that more than take care to actually curate examples of homophobia, the creator of this video just edited together every joke on "Friends" that ever involved homosexuality and heteronormativity without considering what the jokes were actually about -- which irks me both as a progressive AND as a comedy writer.  

A very important fact I think you gotta have to consider is, that those shows - as so many others by that time (and also many nowadays) - hadn't one gay actor or any leading actor playing a gay person. Gay people just rarely appeared in supporting roles. So they almost always judge and joke (together with the audience as a third person) from a certain distance. I think thats a popular way of reproducing the heterosexual norm. 

@ihops:
but the undercurrent of nearly all the jokes is: it is worse to be thought of as gay than straight; it is worse to be gay than straight; it is worse to transgress gender roles (which is attributed to LGBT people) than to conform to gender roles.

i don't think friends is worse than most other sitcoms of the era, but it did have a larger audience and a longer run, and that's why it's important.  

that said, if Mamula had included a textual analysis of at least one of the scenes, in order to demonstrate to skeptics how those jokes do rely on homophobia, then it wouldn't be up to us commenters to explicate "soft homophobia."  :)

I don't know. I didn't watch the whole thing, but I've seen every episode of Friends several times. I think it's interesting to see how masculinity and femininity are navigated, but I don't feel that these jokes are homophobic. 

I think Mamula is pulling teeth here.....

Also, i think the inclusion of the story line of Chandler's trans father was good. Monica  pointed out that his father was a good father even though he expressed his sexuality in an unconventional way. And Chandler was able to reconnect with his father and accept his father, and even love him. That road is not really crossed in many other sitcoms. 

What's do sad about this is that this soft homophobia is still prelevalent in television - just look at How I met you mother and how many jokes that involve intimacy between the male characters, with the implicit punchline being that actual attraction between them is impossible because ... god knows, conventional masculinity perhaps? Despite all the progress made, the notion of homo- and bisexulity being "somewhere else but not here" is still not just dominating, but actively reproduced in gags like this.

on a side note, where do all the apologists come from? How is it that we can discuss poses and lighitng inadvertising from a feminist perspective, but not an overwhelming heap of gay jokes on Friends? Is it because people like the shwo (because god knows that fans will do anything to not have to see their favourite show as anything but perfect) or do people really have that hard a time applying what they've learned of norms and social stigma to gay issues?

I've been meaning to do something like this for a while. I never paid too much attention to the show until this year (dragging unemployment, three re-runs a day), and the hilaaaarious heteronormativity was making me itch.

I agree that there is some homophobia in here. But I feel like there are a few in here that don't deserve it. Mentioning gayness and homophobia is completely different.

No homophobia is gentle; it all feeds oppression.  These kinds of jokes may well avoid provoking anger in straight viewers, but they're not (usually) the ones who see that oppression on a daily basis. Imagine substituting race for queerness in this video and quote: would you be reporting in the same way, or would you be more condemnatory?  SocIm really needs to improve its coverage of queer issues.

I think the relavent factor here has not been discussed. Friends went off the air in 2004, just as the first state was legalizing same-sex marriage. In 2001, the hey-day of Friends, only 39% of the population supported same-sex marriage in the US, although over 70% of people stated that they knew someone who was gay or lesbian. Now, a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. 

The general attitudes towards gay and lesbian individuals in the US is changing so quickly, it is wildly out of date to turn to Friends. I remember as a teenager being hurt at the lack of positive representation of gays and lesbians in all television shows. But teenagers today aren't watching Friends in the same numbers that they are watching shows like Glee, which has a very positive message about gays, and seeks to depict how homophobia is hurtful and immature. They watch (or watched) shows like Grey's Anatomy, that shows lesbian couples go though all the trials of straight couples, while highlighting the issues (mostly political) that are unique to them. Name a show, from Modern Family to Brothers and Sisters or daytime soaps, and more likely than not there is a gay or lesbian character on it. And those characters are increasingly not played by gay actors, necessarily. In fact, I think gay and lesbian characters are doing better on television than black or hispanic characters, or if not statistically, they will be soon. Gays and lesbians are becoming part of the mainstream so quickly that this example seems almost a century out of date in the quickened history that is gay and lesbian history of the last 40+ years.

This is a good thing. We can point out the mistakes of the past, and still recognize that holding a 1990s TV show to our modern day standards is a little ridiculous. That's like criticizing the Brady Bunch for not representing an inter-race marriage without recognizing that it was one of the first American TV shows to depict a husband and wife sharing a bed. That's definitely a step in the right direction for comfort with sexual intimacy in the mainstream. Which goes along with what others have said: incorporation into light-hearted humor is a clear manifestation of whether something is mainstream or not. So let's not over analyze the past for what it wasn't.

And one of the co-creators of the show (David Crane) is openly gay.

I never realized just how lame the jokes in this show were, not just from an anti-homophobia perspective, just in general. Glad I was pro-Seinfeld.

I think the show can be faulted for some poor writing and over-reliance on cheap jokes that easily get laughs: gay jokes. Unfortunately, I can fault this show about as much as I can fault my average housemate/roommate in college. All of this humor is so pervasive it may even come across as harmless.

As a gay man who's endured many, many homophobic comments (both sly & direct) I'm usually quite sensitive to this topic. Nothing really prepares you for the total stranger who approaches your three year old in a supermarket & tells him that it's disgusting that he has two dads. But, I'm really not seeing anything too Earth shattering. Given the demographic this show targeted, it did more to help gay people than it did harm. Many of the clips were intended as satire & usually perceived as such by a generation that was already familiar with homosexuality & more accepting of it. Many of the scenes were designed to show just how foolish anti-gay attitudes & beliefs are. I believe that message was usually heard by the audience.

In interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I never watched Friends. But, I don't watch any TV as I don't own one. My opinion is based on info & interviews that I've read over the years.