Cynthia Nixon, Wanda Sykes, and many more take to 30 Rock and speak amid writers’ strike

“We’ve got to figure out streaming residuals. What I think is getting lost is we’re not asking for more money; we’re asking for money we are owed. We are owed money via residuals. The companies have designed a way via streaming not to pay us. … We’re asking for a deal from the studios that will allow us to share the successes of the art we create that makes writing a sustainable career. I used the word art instead of content, and normally, any actor that would use the word art would make me roll my eyes, but these companies are calling what we do content in order to devalue it because they think it can be created by AI. And we need to make sure we keep treating art as both a reflection of our human soul and also as the result of real labor that deserves fair compensation.”Philipps closed out her speech with a slew of jokes on David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the studio heads responsible for holding up a fair contract. She thanked the WGA writers who came up with these zingers, including writers from Late Night, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, her Girls5eva co-star Pell, Ike Barinholtz, and Simran Baidwan. It would be criminal not to publish some of these: “In the words of David Zaslav, as an actor, I’m so glad to be here with all you difficult people I have to get along with.”