Word: letterman
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...strike Jokes, at least, have died down. David Letterman - back on the air with his writers after making a separate deal with the Writers Guild - has moved on to wisecracks about the Cloverfield monster and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Jay Leno, who has returned sans scribes but is supposedly writing the monologues himself (angering the Guild, which claims he's violating strike rules by doing so), is pummeling viewers with the usual rat-a-tat of gags playing off the headlines, from the presidential primaries to funny animal news...
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...
...taken him under her wing when he arrived from Indiana with his wife in 1975, making him an MC?joined the picket line after he finished a stint as guest host on the Tonight Show. "This was the umbilical cord for a lot of guys, myself included," says Letterman. "Money wasn't necessarily an issue for me, because I had a couple of bucks in the bank. But for these other guys, this was it. This was sustenance...
When she saw Letterman picketing, Shore was crushed. "I watched him from the bay window here," she would recall years later, frail and shaking from a nervous disorder and sitting in the empty showroom at the Comedy Store. "I was taken aback. I was crying. Three and a half years working with him, every night. I called him that night at his apartment. I was totally choked up. And he said, 'Those comedians are my friends. And they'll be my friends for the rest of my life.' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that, David.'" Says Argus Hamilton...
...fees too, to 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...