You might have read that Hollywood’s writers are on strike. It started last week and my feeling is that it could go on for quite a while. For movies and shows shot months in advance you won’t notice anything until April or May. But for a nightly show like ours the effect is instant. And we are not alone – Jon Stewart, David Letterman, plus the daily shows too are all affected.

The strike involves anybody that writes anything, including film. Most of the last writers’ contracts were made back in the 1980s before the advent of DVDs and that stuff. So now a movie that might only do $10m or $12m in movie sales suddenly does $60m or $70m in DVD sales. That’s sort of the argument, covering pay for DVD as well as all this new media; the internet and podcasts and all of that.

When you do a show every day, and do an 11-minute monologue at the start, you have a tremendous amount of material and all the writers contribute and then you decide what you want.

The jokes vary from wildly inappropriate to way too tame, and everybody covers different things. You have utility guys who are good at banging out those kind of everyday jokes and then you have the people that don’t write a lot of jokes but the ones they do write are really good and oddball. So everybody plays a different role when you put together a comedy show.

I have some former Republican speechwriters and I have some former Democratic speechwriters and people from different walks of life, so we get a lot of different viewpoints. When you do a show like I do, the main thing is that you try to be funny and you try to degrade and humiliate everybody equally!

The writers have picket lines all around Hollywood and on Monday I went down on my motorcycle, delivering doughnuts to the writers . . . my fear being that the writers would continue to walk in circles on the picket line, and end up getting into shape. Then they would switch to fruit bars and tofu, no longer eat doughnuts, regain their self-esteem and no longer be funny. One thing comedy writers need is that writer’s body that one only gets from eating snacks all the time.

I don’t see myself crossing the picket line. Let’s see how long this thing lasts. I have a situation where if I stay out long enough the people on my show will be laid off. The studio’s not going to continue to pay them a salary when there is no work to do. We don’t really know what’s going to happen. Monday was the first day and everybody’s marching with bravado, but we’ll see what happens.

Many of the Hollywood stars are speechless because they have nobody to write anything for them. Unless they have words written for them, many of them are not capable of speaking on their own. Not all the stars need writers. Tom Hanks is a good comic. George Clooney’s good too. Clooney’s always funny. He’s got a good sense of humour.

He told a story on my show once. Early on, Clooney had a roommate and this roommate had a cat. Every day Clooney would go to the cat box and take out all the cat poop and throw it away, to the point that the roommate began to be worried and think there was something wrong with the cat. He said to Clooney: “Gee, the cat’s not going to the bathroom.” And Clooney says: “Oh give it a couple of days,” and the whole time he’s getting rid of all the cat poop. Then the guy says he’s really worried and Clooney says: “Look, give him a laxative.” Then Clooney, or a friend of Clooney’s, went to the toilet in the cat box himself. So when the guy came in the next day, he was like: “Oh, my God!”

It’s tempting to spend this down time in the garage and driving my cars but we are all in this together. I need my writers. So if this column is not as funny as it should be, don’t blame me. The writers are on strike.

— Editor’s note: Jay Leno spoke these words and The Sunday Times wrote them down