Striking WGA Late-Night Comedy Writers Launch YouTube Show Lampooning The Studios

deadline.com:

Late-night comedy shows were shut down on the very first day of the ongoing Writers Guild’s strike, but many of their now out-of-work writers are banding together to put on a weekly YouTube Channel show alternately titled “Picket Tonight” or “The Jokes You Love from the Picket Signs but We’re Saying Them Out Loud.” “Whatever it’s called, this is where two striking WGA writers sit at a desk and tell you jokes,” said Greg Iwinski, a former writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, who co-hosted the inaugural episode along with Sasha Stewart, a former writer on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.

Lampooning studio bosses for refusing to pay writers an additional sliver of their companies’ profits, Stewart quipped, “Come on.

That’s not a lot of cash. It’s what the studio heads would normally call ‘pocket yacht money.’” “As you may know, writers are on strike,” said Iwinski, who will host the show with a rotating ensemble of joke-tellers. “What you may not know is that according to nine out of ten doctors, if a late-night writer doesn’t do monologue jokes for too many consecutive days, they die.” Those nine doctors, he revealed, include Dr.

Fauci, Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Dr. Zhivago and Dr. Pepper. “We’ll bring you jokes and sketches whenever we can,” he said in the intro, “and you’ll get to hear from writers inside the strike about what we’re fighting for and why the studios need to talk to us.” Or as Stewart put it, “We’re two of the many writers who will be reading these strike propaganda jokes, so if you’re like, ‘I want to watch someone more attractive,’ just wait a week.” As for the contract talks that broke off on May 1, Iwinski joked: “One of the biggest issues with the