Word: leno
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Their conflicted roles in the current strike hark back to a less well remembered labor battle of nearly three decades ago. Letterman and Leno were key figures in one of the strangest and bitterest labor-management disputes in show-business history: the Comedy Store strike...
...with the same gripes and anxieties as everyone else. They joked about furnishing their tiny apartments and riding the subways and trying to get girls. The strike against the Comedy Store, the leading comedy club in Los Angeles, reinforced their real-life status as working-class crusaders. For both Leno, who ostentatiously took doughnuts to the picketing writers on the first day of the current strike, and Letterman, who more quietly assured his staff that he would pay their salaries in the weeks the show was dark, the first strike was a cautionary?and formative?experience...
...Leno, a gregarious and widely admired regular at the club, was one of the early firebrands. Letterman, another top club comic and strike supporter (and a fan of Leno's), thought he was a little out of control. "Jay, bless his heart, couldn't sit still," Letterman recalls of one early mass meeting. "He was behaving like a hyperactive child: jumping up and down, being funny and distracting, to the point where everybody sort of thought, Well, maybe we shouldn't tell Jay about the next meeting...
Tensions between the strikers and the nonstrikers grew. One night, the bad blood got out of hand as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that he had been seriously hurt. Leno gave Dreesen a wink; he was only feigning an injury and had thumped the car with his hand. But he got hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance anyway, and the incident seemed to sober up both sides...
...lure more top comics out on the road?launching the comedy-club boom of the 1980s. All of which was part of laying the groundwork for a culture in which comedians turned TV hosts help set the national agenda and have would-be Presidents as guests. Letterman and Leno may look more like management than labor these days?more Mitzi Shore than strikers. But they haven't forgotten the old grievances. They know all the lines...