Word: strikeingly
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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...
...three-month-old strike has sidelined more than 12,000 writers - writers of prime-time shows you can't live without, movies you haven't heard of yet and soap operas you're pretty sure are recycling story lines from 10 years ago. But it's the late-night hosts who have been in the most visible, and delicate, position. Leno and Letterman are both former stand-up comics and Guild members themselves, who supported their fellow union members for weeks, refusing to do their shows until the prospect of laying off all their nonstriking staff members forced them into...
...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...
...just anti-Establishment rabble rousers; they were intimate, populist artists who got their power by convincing us that they were ordinary folks, 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...