Writers protest on Hollywood Boulevard. Photograph: Peter Brooker/Rex Features
While the effects of the strike called by the Writers Guild Of America won't be felt by most British film and TV viewers for months or years to come, fans of America's late night comedy programming are already suffering. No sooner do we get Letterman back on a UK channel than he's replaced by repeats, while the absence of fresh Daily Show material is a real blow.
But comedy writers being comedy writers, they simply can't stop. Thinking up jokes is a neurosis, a compulsion, and if you can't do it for your job, then inevitably you start doing it for your cause. Hooray then, as so often, for the internet, which provides an outlet and a handy campaigning tool all in one. The WGA has humour on its side - a potent weapon indeed.
Thus Letterman's writing staff on The Late Show have set up Late Show Writers on Strike, described by contributor Steve Young as "all the fun of working on the show, without the stress or the pay." Here you can find your fix of the gag style so familiar to Letterman addicts, including in-joke formulae which are funny via repetition: "Everyone in New York City is behind the writers. Today, I was walking through Central Park, and I saw a squirrel picketing his nuts." That was posted by staffer Bill Scheft, who has been quick to point out that Letterman backs his striking writers. When Scheft suggested his boss take a look at the site, the latter supposedly replied, "Oh, I guess that means I have to buy a computer."
As most American comedy writers are self-deprecating geeks, they know that wry humour will serve them better than declamatory rhetoric. Hence such spoof items as guild members Brian Sawyer and Gregg Rossen's Heroes of the Writers Strike, which pokes fun at their colleagues' unemployability in any other field; and Oren Kaplan's WGA Strike Gets Violent! (with an anonymous writing credit for a striking scribe), spoofing the hipster-buddy-cop sub-genre, with a pair of vain, bickering but brutal WGA enforcers taking on a laptop-tapping blackleg in a coffee-shop.
Unsurprisingly, it's the satirists who land the most telling cyber-punches. Jason Ross's Not the Daily Show employs a familiar combination of sarcasm, mugging and the pursuit of fallacies to their illogical conclusions to make the writers' case (they want to be paid when their work is used on the internet, a neat irony that of course has not escaped the writers putting unpaid work on the internet to achieve this). Similarly, contributors to The Colbert Report pull off their customary trick of skewering their target by impersonating it. "Guess who writes the news, folks," fumes their parodic executive. "Writers! They control the media, and it's about time those of us who own movie studios and TV networks had our voices heard ..."
Read on: Click here for more writers' responses to the strike.
