The Funniest Signs of the Writer’s Strike
It’s been two weeks since the Writers Guild of America went on Strike against AMPTP, and other than saying writers deserve a living wage, honestly all I want to talk about is the funny signs.
Film and TV writers are some of the funniest people on earth, and protest signs might be the only way to enjoy their new content for a while.
Here are the ground rules for how I’m determining the funniest strike signs. Using a search string of all the phrases, hashtag, and Twitter handles relevant to the WGA, I identified through ListenFirst’s social listening tool the strike sign Tweets with the most engagements.
It’s a little obnoxious using data analytics as a proxy for what’s funny, but that may or may not be how Netflix makes creative decisions, so at the very least you're used to it.
Anyway, the most popular strike sign so far was shared in this Tweet getting 79,204 engagements. The sign read "Chat GPT doesn't have childhood trauma." Clearly there’s a gig writing a Batman movie or Disney cartoon in this writer’s future.
The next most popular sign Tweet was from the creator of the Animaniacs, who spotted a sign reading “Pay us! OR I will climb the WB tower and release the Animaniacs I swear to God!!!!
The third most popular sign came from writer/comic Jenny Yang, who reasoned "Give up just one yacht". By the way, that might be a conservative estimate. For example, Business Insider reports that David Geffen, who founded Dreamworks paid $590 million for a yacht, while the Writer's Guild is looking for pay increases that would amount to about $429 million a year.
In the fourth most popular funny sign Tweet, Mandy Patinkin held up a rewrite of his famous Princess Bride line, “you killed my father prepare to die”.
The fifth most popular funny sign Tweet was a two-for by the star and creator of Hulu's upcoming Washington Black series, reading "I'm an actor, I literally don't know what to say" and "Netflix, we got Beef".
Conclusion
Now, none of the funny sign posts were among the top 5 best performing Tweets about the Writer’s strike. For example, the top performing Strike related Tweet was by Quinta Brunson (152,265 engagement) earnestly demanding fair compensation for writers. Meanwhile a Tweet by the Duffer brothers announcing production on Stranger Things has stopped got 81,854 engagements.
However, if a non famous writer wants to successfully raise awareness around the strike, a funny sign is the most succinct way to do it.