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Al Franken. Seriously.

by Nina Burleigh
March/April 2008 , Page 78

When it comes to politics, Franken has always been funny. But his humor is increasingly fueled by outrage."

High-school teacher Roy Magnuson’s house sits at the far end of a triangle of crusted snow in residential St. Paul, its steamy glass storm door an inviting beacon on a frigid January night. College kids stand on the lawn bobbing “Al Franken: Democrat for U.S. Senate” placards. Indoors, the man of the hour works an overflow crowd of several hundred. The cackling “heh-heh-heh,” so familiar from Franken’s years on television and radio, gives away his precise location as he chats up a husband and wife. When they identify themselves as psychology professors, Franken barks, “Maslow!,” an impromptu reference to the 20th-century psychologist. Spying a reporter, he adds, “I’ve just insulted them. I’m not slick at this!”

To cheers and applause, Franken, decked out in a crisp blue suit, ascends the makeshift stage—a coffee table strewn with a half-eaten bounty of cookies, potato chips, sour cream dip, Triscuits, and crudités. A baby squalls. Make-up-free women and men in sensible Ecuadoran knits sip Miller High Life and Dr Pepper.

From his perch, Franken thanks “Ray,” his host. “It’s Roy!” someone shouts. Roy Magnuson, a longtime leader in the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, has been a great resource, Franken hastens to say. With the help of people like Roy, Franken is sure he can beat Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s 2008 Senate race. Then, before launching into his stump issues—more health care for children, more federal aid to college students, more renewable energy, fewer Americans in Iraq—Franken recalls when he started to get serious about politics.

“After I left Saturday Night Live, the [Newt] Gingrich revolution was ascendant,” he says. “It was 1995, and [Republicans] were trying to unravel the social safety net. And I took it personally—my family did. When my wife was 17 months old, her father died in a car accident coming home from his shift at the paper factory, leaving his widow at 29 with five kids. But they made it. They made it because of Social Security survivor benefits.” It is a powerful moment, particularly because the wife in question, Franni Franken, sits on a nearby couch.

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Photograph by David J. TurnerAl Franken, January 2008.

Now 56 years old, Al Franken has been a television comedian for 30-odd years. He is also a film actor, radio talk-show host, and best-selling author who has perfected the art of lampooning conservative talkers such as Rush Limbaugh and . His run for Senate has come as a surprise to those who have only known him from characters such as self-love guru Stuart Smalley or the “One-Man Mobile Uplink,” a prescient parody of television journalism. But Franken has for decades straddled the border between satire and politics, and what is fascinating about his campaign is not just the sight of a famous comedian running for office—though that is part of it—but the evolution of a mostly funny man into a mostly serious one.

Standing on Roy Magnuson’s coffee table, Franken ends his speech with a well-crafted flourish: “I’m not afraid of Rush, Fox News, not even Cheney! Although, you know I don’t go huntin’ with him!” Franken pauses for the laughter to die down. “And I’m sure not afraid of Norm Coleman.”

Franken made his decision to run for Senate after the death of Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, who was killed in a small plane crash on October 25, 2002. Wellstone was a college professor whose first underdog campaign in 1990 was followed by two terms in Washington, where he was among the Senate’s most liberal voices, and Minnesotans loved his modest demeanor and political passion. Franken had campaigned for Wellstone, and the two had grown close; Franken would speak at Wellstone’s memorial service, held at an arena at the University of Minnesota and attended by some 20,000 mourners. After some speakers vocally promoted former vice president Walter Mondale as Wellstone’s replacement, conservative critics such as the Weekly Standard lambasted the memorial as a “[Democratic National Committee] pep rally.” Franken was furious. It was, he would say, “a perfect political storm for Republican opportunists.”

Later, “I gave a speech at the opening of a photo show on Paul,” Franken says. “It was emotional for me, and I gave an emotional speech. A couple people came up afterward and said, ‘You should think about running.’ That planted a seed.”

Minnesota has a long tradition of progressive politics, sometimes with a twist. The state Democratic party is known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party since a 1944 merger brought together Democrats and labor-oriented progressives. (Today, candidates seeking the DFL nomination must survive three sets of caucuses and a state nominating convention.) Minnesota has given the country iconic Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Mondale, and Wellstone. But Minnesotans also elected professional wrestler and political independent Jesse Ventura as governor.

Complicating this election is the fact that Minnesota is undergoing profound demographic change. No longer does the state look like a pastoral, Scandinavian enclave of dairy farmers and Paul Bunyans. The farms and timber tracts are still here, but anti-union meatpacking plants and other industries have attracted low-skilled—and low-paid—immigrants from Mexico. Minneapolis is home to large first- and second-generation Russian, Hmong (a Southeast Asian ethnic group), and Somali populations as well.

The I-35W bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis last August that killed 13 people provoked Minnesotans to confront another major adjustment in self-image. “Having the bridge fall down was hugely troubling to people here,” says Wy Spano, a Minnesota Democratic political commentator. “For older folks particularly, there was the sense that Minnesota was the place that was well-run, where we did it right. Now, to be in the [national] leadership on the crumbling infrastructure issue is painful.”

Spano says that Franken may have arrived at just the right moment in Minnesota for an electoral novice, when voters are ripe for someone new and different. But not everyone agrees. Franken’s main competition for the DFL nomination is Mike Ciresi, a trial lawyer who, in 1998, won a landmark case against big tobacco, reaping billions for the state treasury. The most liberal candidate, and probably Wellstone’s ideological heir, is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, an assistant professor of “Justice and Peace Studies” at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. But compared to his Democratic opponents, Nelson-Pallmeyer is significantly underfunded.

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Portraits of the artist as a young man: Franken as a boy in Minnesota; parents weekend at Harvard with Joe and Phoebe Franken, October 1969; and receiving his diploma at commencement in Dunster House, June 1973.

So far, Franken, Ciresi, and Nelson-Pallmeyer have focused their criticisms on first-term incumbent Norm Coleman, a former St. Paul mayor who ran for Senate at the urging of White House aide Karl Rove and won in the aftermath of Wellstone’s death. Recent polls have shown Coleman, who is considered a moderate Republican, in a dead heat against either Franken or Ciresi. That’s not promising for an incumbent—undecided voters tend to break toward challengers—especially with the country in an economic downturn. The DFL nominee for Senate should stand a solid chance of retaking the seat for the Democrats. Senator Franken? It just might happen.

Al Franken’s conventional political experience is, it’s fair to say, limited. At Westwood Junior High in suburban Minneapolis in the 1960s, he twice ran for class president. In the seventh grade, he won. In eighth grade, he lost to the most popular athlete in school. The defeat, Franken jokes, still hurts.

He was born in 1951 in New York City, the younger of two brothers. His mother, Phoebe, was a housewife, and his father, Joseph, worked at a toy company. In 1955 the Frankens moved to a small, southern Minnesota town named Albert Lea, where Joseph opened a quilting factory. It soon closed. His father had chosen that obscure town, Al claims, simply because “the train went through it.” Unfortunately, Franken adds, “It just didn’t stop there.” The family moved to St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb, where Joseph found work as a printing salesman while Phoebe became a realtor. The Frankens were Republicans until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when they became active Democrats.

Al was always a good student and, after high school, he headed back east to enroll at Harvard. An admirer of Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce, he also had a passion for comedy. In Boston, he and a friend from Minnesota, Tom Davis, wrote and performed stand-up comedy, and after they graduated in 1973, Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels hired them as writers to help launch the show. Among Franken’s more notorious sketches from the early days were “The Final Days,” a parody of the Nixon presidency, and a “Weekend Update” commentary arguing that, if the 1970s were the “Me Decade,” the 1980s would be the “Al Franken Decade.” In his singular deadpan style, Franken said that, as the new decade began, “I’ll still be thinking of me—Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me—Al Franken.”

In fact, the 1980s were challenging for Franken, who moved to L.A. and tried his hand at screenwriting and acting with little success. In the 1990s, he was back at SNL, impersonating politicians such as Pat Robertson and Paul Simon, and developing his most famous character, Stuart Smalley. The line between traditional and non-traditional political media was beginning to blur, and Franken was well–positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that convergence created. In 1988, CNN hired him to provide commentary for the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. In 1992 and 1996, he anchored Comedy Central’s election coverage, later teaming up with then-Republican Arianna Huffington, and the pair shared an Emmy nomination for Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect in 1996.

That same year, Franken published Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, an attack on the talk-radio host who, Franken thought, served as the dishonest mouthpiece of the Republican revolution. The book became a massive bestseller, striking a chord with Democrats who felt that, at last, someone was defending them against the vociferous onslaught of right-wing media. “Don’t underestimate how much it means to have what you believe articulated really well,” says Andy Barr, Franken’s communications director. “To hear somebody saying something and feel, ‘Yes, this is what I’m trying to say.’” And Franken was fighting back not by being earnest and self-important, like an NPR commentator or a New York Times columnist. Franken was taking on the Right by being funny.

“I’m a comedian who pays a lot of attention to politics,” Franken said at the time. “I don’t know if I want to commit my career to politics. It’s tempting now, though, because this book is doing so well.” He elaborated on that temptation in Why Not Me?, a 1999 book chronicling a fake Franken run for president. That same year, Franken considered taking the job of editor in chief of George, the now-defunct political monthly, after the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. But Franken and the magazine’s publisher could not come to terms.

In the spring of 2003, Franken spent a semester as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. While there, he wrote another best seller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Fox quickly sued Franken for trademark infringement over his use of the phrase “fair and balanced.” When a judge ruled that the lawsuit was “wholly without merit,” Franken quipped that that was also a pretty good description of Fox News. Lies also led to a heated confrontation with Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly at a book convention in May 2003, with O’Reilly calling Franken “vicious” and shouting at him to “shut up.” A year later, when Franken signed up as a host on Air America, the liberal radio network, for a reported $2 million a year, Franken continued the sparring by naming his show The O’Franken Factor.

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A man in full: Franken (clockwise from top left) on a USO trip in 2003; on SNL’s “Weekend Update” in 1986; taking voters’ questions in December ’07; as Stuart Smalley in 2000; and campaigning for Senate, twice.

When it comes to politics, Franken has always been funny. But, over the past decade or so, that humor has become more steadily fueled by outrage and sometimes, simply, rage—a simmering frustration over Franken’s belief that the nation has been degraded by the Gingrich revolution and its descendants. His books manifest his deep frustration that political speech is not more decent, more civilized, more humane. Some would say that Franken’s words—calling Limbaugh a "fat idiot," for example—contribute to that uncivil atmosphere; he would respond that he is standing up to bullies.

And this is the irony about Franken: While on the surface, he comes across a chronic joker, a man who couldn’t pass up a punchline to save his life, he is, at heart, as earnest as all those liberals for whom he speaks. This is why Al Franken can’t help but joke: because he would rather laugh than scream.

On a crisp recent Sunday morning, Franken suited up to greet several hundred supporters crammed into the Lookout Bar and Grill, a faux-chalet sports bar in Maple Grove, a northern suburb of Minneapolis. In the standing-room-only audience, Mary Harms, 57, and her father, John Dennis, an 86-year-old World War II veteran leaning on a cane, wrote Franken a check for $100. Mary, a mother and grandmother, said she was parting with the cash because “I am worried about our children’s future. I want my kids to have the chances that the rest of us had.”

Franken takes his time with Harms and her father, posing for pictures, cracking the huge grin that’s half Alfred E. Neuman and half Mardi Gras mask. Stumping at roadhouses and town halls from the north woods to the dairy farms, he’s got his views honed to centrist Democratic nuggets. On health care, for example, Franken won’t endorse a single-payer plan, even though he thinks it might be the best solution to soaring medical bills and insurance rates. Rather, he says that states should establish universal health care for children as they see fit, creating “51 laboratories” (the states plus the District of Columbia) of public policy experiments.

When the subject turns to Iraq, Franken is conservative, at least by the standards of his party’s left wing. He supports a timetable for departure, but will not say that the United States should bring its troops home at once. “There’s no good way out,” he says. “Only bad and worse.” Such carefully calibrated stands suggest that Franken’s positions may be more conservative than his comedy. And in fact, although he grew up in Minnesota, Franken matured on the Washington-New York-Boston intellectual corridor, and he counts among his brain trust inside-the-Beltway types such as Washington pundit Norm Ornstein and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr.. His other Harvard friends include columnist Michael Kinsley, writer Walter Isaacson, and diplomat Peter Galbraith. “I spend most of my professional life kicking around ideas with members of the House and Senate and Al, frankly, has a better grasp of the issues than they do,” Ornstein says.

Republicans claim to be eager to face Franken, whose past as a satirist and member of the cocaine-fueled SNL writing team—Franken has admitted to using coke in the 1980s—would seem to make him vulnerable. When Franken says something, with that grumbly, gravelly voice, the humor is obvious. But in print, his words can come across as harsh and outrageous, like something he’d fault Rush Limbaugh for saying. On The Late Show with David Letterman in October 2005, Franken joked that Karl Rove and Cheney right-hand man Scooter Libby should fear for their lives after allegedly outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. “Basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed [because] outing a CIA agent is treason,” he joked. “And I don’t know how I feel about it, because I’m basically against the death penalty.”

Such jokes make Republicans fume; Franken, they say, is at best a hypocrite and at worst unstable. On the conservative website NewsBusters, a columnist named Warner Todd Huston recently questioned Franken’s fitness for public office. “It seems that an ungovernable rage is always just under the surface with Franken,” Huston said.

Interviewed one January evening in his three-story, Minneapolis townhouse, with Franni next to him on the couch, Franken pondered whether his previous career would haunt him in a general election. “The Republicans and Coleman cynically pretend not to understand irony and other tools of satire, [such as] exaggeration and ambiguity,” he says. “They will take a joke I’ve told and say something about it that is literally true but wasn’t the point.” Franni jumps in. “Most Minnesotans are very smart! They know what a joke is. People don’t approach Al and say, ‘In 1976, you said such and such; what did you mean by that?’ They say, ‘I am losing my pension; what are you going to about that?’”

“There’s no percentage in explaining every joke I’ve ever told,” Al continues. “But I do think that people understand there’s a difference between me being a satirist and comedian and a senator. There are certain things you would say as a comedian that would be inappropriate to say as a senator, and I’m not going to say those things because it would be disrespectful to the people of Minnesota and the Senate.”

Franken can’t resist the punchline, remembering that in 2004 Vice President Cheney told Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself.”

“I certainly wouldn’t do what Dick Cheney did to Pat Leahy,” Franken says.

The next morning, Franken will continue stumping around his home state. As he often does, he’ll talk about the simpler, happier, more civil America of his Midwestern boyhood, a time when kids looked up to their presidents—and so did the rest of the world. He gets big laughs when he tells crowds that, as he talks to college students around the country, he realizes they have “never known what it’s like to have a president who is articulate.”

The line is funny, but there’s also a sense of loss in Franken’s words that feels authentic. Speaking to the crowd at the Lookout Bar and Grill, Franken remembered, “When I was eight years old, Dwight Eisenhower was entering the last year of his presidency, and he decided to take a valedictory tour around the world—Africa, Asia, Europe—and everywhere he went, in every city, people lined the streets waving American flags.”

That is the America Al Franken believes in, and when he talks about it, he isn’t joking.

A man in full: Franken (clockwise from top left) visiting the nation’s capital in 2003; visiting American troops in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, in December 2005; outside NBC’s Rockefeller Center in 1975; and on the stump last December.