Huckabee Strokes Bass, Base On Leno

Perhaps taking a page out of Bill Clinton's strategy book--his sax playing on Arsenio Hall's show in June 1992, during his successful presidential campaign prompted the host to say, "It's nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election"--Mike Huckabee played a little bass with Jay Leno's band as he appeared on The Tonight Show earlier this evening.

We know the joke Hall's quote may invoke, but let's not go there.

Huckabee's protestations that he is writer-friendly didn't entirely impress the WGA, which released this statement:

The Writers Guild is disappointed that Mike Huckabee crossed the WGA picket line today at NBC. We welcome the statements of support he has made for striking writers, but we ask him to respect our picket lines in the future and urge the media conglomerates to return to the bargaining table to make a fair deal that will put writers and the entertainment industry back to work.

Leno took pains to give the writers a boost--the theme of his opening monologue was his haplessness in the face of lacking writers, and he declared that his wife had been the arbiter of what was funny in his spiel. (Which technically, as seems sure to be debated by the WGA gatekeepers and Leno's producers, may have put him in violation of rules set by the WGA, in which he is a member.)

NBC made a transcript available. Said Leno with his usual folksy wryness:

A Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, walk into a bar. The Jew says to the Muslim. ..see, I have no idea what they say because there's a writers strike. We don't know what they say.

As you know, we are in the middle of this writers' strike here in Hollywood. It's already cost the town over a half a billion dollars. Five hundred million dollars! Or as Paul McCartney calls that, "a divorce."

He also, en route to one of several jokes that involved a bit of show and tell (e.g., a supposed view of NBC honcho Jeff Zucker's mansion and a contrasting one of a shanty in `Writer Town.') highlighted a point that will continue to echo, as it has over past weeks:

People want to know why we came back on the air when we did? Well, we were off for two months as I said, I was on the strike every single day. I was on the strike line everyday while they were talking. Then a couple weeks ago the talks broke off. No new talks were scheduled, so we had to come back because we have essentially 19 people putting 160 people out of work.

Such logic is not too remote from that embodied by a small and quiet but significant rogue element of "A-list writers" who have formed an action group to press for a solution to the strike even as the Directors Guild grows more eager to step up and find a way to reopen the stalled talks. (Their studies of the much-debated, potential Internet revenue, studies which cost some hundreds of thousands, are rapidly being readied for presentation, perhaps as soon as next week.)

Meanwhile, Conan O'Brien, like David Letterman sporting a `strike beard' ("It looks like it ties on in the back...I grew it out of solidarity with my writer and to prove I have some testosterone."), hewed to his usual self-deprecating line and managed to inject some wit into what's also a predicament:

We're back now but, sadly, we do not have our writers with us. I want to make this clear, I support their cause -- these are very talented, very creative people who work extremely hard and I believe what they're asking for is fair. My biggest wish is that they get a great deal very quickly and get back here because we desperately need them on the show. Think about it: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, The Masturbating Bear, The Walker Texas Ranger Lever -- it's all writing. Well, not The Masturbating Bear. That's just instinct. Which brings us to the big $64,000 question of the evening: What do we do now?

The second tier of late-night hosts--notably, Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson, as discussed in the post below, were asking the same question. And perhaps most importantly, so were the actors and other guests who typically fill the air time that the struck chat shows, while off to a brave and mildly entertaining start, and may soon be struggling to keep lively.