Jay Leno pays and pays and pays

I think it was Steve Martin who said "Comedy isn't pretty," and he didn't even know at the time what was going to be done to Jay Leno.

It isn't pretty at all.

For the crime of being a Writers Guild of America member, the Tonight Show host was forced off the air by a WGA strike, shamed into paying the salaries of the show's non-writing staff, pressured to return to the air without his writers, expected to deliver a quality show to compete in the ratings with a show that was given an interim WGA contract, and now faces WGA discipline for writing his own monologue in accordance with NBC's interpretation of the WGA basic agreement.

The union could throw him out.

He ought to go, and gratefully.

The Writers Guild is on strike for nothing. Members are losing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to secure nickels and dimes from Internet revenue, which is currently zero and likely to remain so.

If the Writers Guild leaders would just get their heads out of The Grapes of Wrath, they would realize that they're not going to bring down corporate America. All they're going to do is wreck Jay Leno's hard-earned reputation and cause a lot of people to lose their houses.

The sensible thing for the WGA to do is to ask for lump-sum payments to its pension and welfare fund to compensate writers for Internet use of their work. Then the all-important health insurance benefits would be secure even as costs endlessly rise, and networks and studios wouldn't be saddled with a million dollars in bookkeeping costs for every five-cent check they have to send out to the heirs of writers, who will join newspaper and music executives in the line of people who will die waiting for their Internet operations to turn a profit.


Copyright 2008

Editor's note: Get your monologue fix from comedian Argus Hamilton at www.ArgusJokes.com, a right-to-work site where the political jokes are always up and the pencils are never down.

You might also be interested in the earlier posts, "The fools at the Guild", "The painful politics of the Writers Guild" and "Who's afraid of the DGA?"