Word: striking
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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...
...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...
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...
...made a compromise offer to pay the comics $25 a set only on weekends, some of them, like Garry Shandling, thought it was fair and went back to work?a blow to the comics' shaky solidarity. "I think there was a lot of good that was accomplished by that strike," says Shandling. "I certainly didn't cross the picket line just to work. But I thought it could have been resolved. It did not need to be dragged...
...strike's impact was far-reaching. Comedy clubs in New York City began paying their comics as well. Clubs that were springing up around the country were then forced to boost their 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...