Leno reminds us: Good writing is valuable asset

In hopes of learning the true — and possibly mystical — value of writers, I did something Wednesday I hadn't done in years. I watched the "Late Show With David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" all the way through (thanks to DVR technology). The occasion, of course, was the programs' return to the air after two months off because of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.

For those who, like Leno's guest that night, Mike Huckabee, are confused about how this was negotiated, let me be the umpteenth person to remind everyone that Letterman, whose production company owns his show and made an independent deal with the WGA, got his writers back. Leno, who quipped that he was "one man against the monolith," was on his own.

Even though three other late-night hosts were also just back to work, this was an opportunity to view the two emperors of late-night TV — one clothed, the other naked without even a single WGA-sanctioned one-liner for a fig leaf. It would, I thought, explain why so many of these writers are Ivy League graduates who could be inventing revolutionary software had they not chosen to follow their muses and write jokes about celebrities in rehab. Surely the difference between the two shows would prove that late-night TV writers, while perhaps not as essential to society as emergency room doctors or really good drivers' ed teachers, add value if for no other reason than they keep their bosses from looking like idiots. (Insert perfunctory vice president joke here, which I'll skip out of solidarity with the striking writers.)

So imagine my surprise and disenchantment when Leno, whose writers' room is now ostensibly being used for storing untapped Arrowhead water jugs, was considerably funnier than a fully staffed Letterman. Of course, that's a matter of opinion (and, in mine, Letterman's reliance on sounding ironic rather than being ironic got old about the time Spam T-shirts — the Hormel product, not the e-mail — went mainstream) but the ratings concurred. Nielsen Media Research reported Thursday that Leno drew 5.8 million viewers versus Letterman's 4.7 million.

Although Leno joked that there were "more people picketing NBC now than watching NBC," Letterman's line, "I hear you at home thinking to yourself, 'This crap is written?"' was more than just self-defense in the form of self-effacement. It was a discomfiting indication of the way lots of people feel about writers, especially the well-paid kind.