Humor gets lost in strike’s shuffle

This is the first in a series of personal essays about the impasse between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Updates will appear regularly at latimes .com/hollywoodwriters -- and occasionally in print.

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” -- Mark Twain

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I’m probably not the best person to write a blog about the Writers Guild strike. I’m mostly known for comedy. I like to keep it light. Political? Me? Not at all. My wife watches those news shows on Fox and CNBC with a great hunger, but to me they’re nothing more than an over-caffeinated farrago of name-calling and finger-pointing by self-promoting, over-opinionated gasbags and cranks. The holidays are coming up. I’ll get more than enough of all that when the family shows up for dinner.

I suppose the L.A. Times asked me to do this because I’d lay out plenty of chuckles as I told tales of living in the time of the strike. And that was my intention. But I find, in this case, I’m unable to muster up my usual brand of high-spirited hilarity. Oh, I tried. I started this entry three or four times, but was unable to mask my anger about the situation we find ourselves in, and my attempts at humor sat on the page and stared back at me, chilly, a little self-righteous and plenty unfunny.

I like producers. I like most of the people I work with at the networks and studios, because I know them as human beings and not as this nameless, faceless golem called the AMPTP. Them -- whoever they are -- them I really don’t like. At this stage, they lie every time they use the word “negotiate,” because they haven’t done it. They came to the table with rollbacks -- an opening salvo designed to say to the WGA negotiators, “We don’t care what you want. You’re not even keeping what you’ve got.” A scare tactic? Perhaps. A productive way to start talks? You tell me.

The guild’s main concern is new media. Jeff Zucker of NBC/GE was quoted in Variety last week as saying that the income from Internet downloads is being measured “in pennies instead of dollars.” I’ll take pennies, Jeff. Rumor has it when you add enough of them together, they turn into dollars. Okay, maybe I’m not looking forward to getting checks for pennies. Unless I’m 6 cents short for my eligibility for WGA health benefits for myself and my family. In that case, send pennies.

See? Not so funny. This will be an adventure, I suppose, living through the strike and writing about it. I’ll be on the picket line in the next couple of days. At this point my only hope is that some of the slogans my brothers and sisters are chanting on the line have improved. I’ve heard some of them on the news. They need a rewrite.

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In his own words

Peter Tolan writes, produces, directs and co-created (with Denis Leary) “Rescue Me.” His television writing credits include “Murphy Brown” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” and his feature film credits include “Analyze This,” “Bedazzled,” “Just Like Heaven” and “Finding Amanda,” the last of which he also directed.