Talking With:

Al Franken

By Bradley Rife

Al Franken is running for president. Okay, not really. And yeah, that does sound like a really bad idea. Al even agrees with you, and he set out to prove it.

Why Not Me?, Franken’s latest book, is a chronicle of the rise and fall of the Franken presidency. A satire of not only the Clinton disaster, but also of the whole process of running for president of the United States in the late 20th century, the book is a mixture of wit and commentary, truth and satire. Franken takes shots at himself, the pundits, the candidates, everyone willing to come into a campaign’s sight. The result is a hysterical book that will leave you doubled over with laughter.

Franken is probably best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live” as Stuart Smalley, the lovable and unlicensed cable access therapist. Franken has always been involved in political satire though, from his early days as a founding member of SNL’s writing staff through more recent times, doing political commentary for CNN and “Politically Incorrect.” Franken’s first book of political satire, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, was a scathing attack on the conservative right, which found a considerably receptive audience. The book spent five weeks in the No. 1 position on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and sold more than a million copies overall.

With the 2000 presidential campaigns in full swing and the first primaries looming near, Franken took some time to talk about the candidates, the new book, and his old stomping grounds of SNL.

OV: Are you a political junkie?

AF: Oh, yeah. I just watched “Inside Politics.” And last night I was in Iowa at the Jefferson Jackson Day dinner at the event that Gore and Bradley spoke at for the first time together, and I spoke too.

OV: Why are you so drawn to politics as a comedian and and as a writer?

AF: It’s one of my interests. In my house growing up, my parents were both interested in it. My dad was a republican and my mom was a democrat, and when we ate dinner we watched the news and talked about it. And I came of age at a pretty volatile time. In fact in 1964, my dad, who was born in 1908 and had voted for Herbert Hoover through Richard Nixon, changed parties because of Goldwater’s opposition to the civil rights bill. I was thirteen then. And then Vietnam, so it was always something I’ve been very interested in, and comedy is the way I deal with pretty much anything.

OV: There was a chapter in Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot titled “Bill Clinton: Greatest President of the 20th Century.” Have you rethought that at all?

AF: Well, it was meant slightly ironically, but aside from the blowjob thing and lying about it, I think he’s done a very good job.

OV: Do you think anything positive came out of the Clinton scandal?

AF: Well, yeah, married couples are having frank discussions about what does and doesn’t constitute adultery. For example, my wife has told me that she believes oral sex is adultery, which I guess explains why we haven’t had any since we’ve been married.

OV: You recently spent some time in Iowa covering the republican straw pole for George magazine. What was your impression of the state of the Republican Party?

AF: I had a good time. As I said in the article, I had only one bad encounter, and that was with Bob Barr. We just had a nasty kind of thing, but other than that I really had a good time and really liked everybody. The Republican Party wants to win so they’re uniting behind this guy [George W. Bush], who . . . um . . . I think he’s like a good guy, I just don’t necessarily think that’s enough. I did a joke last night that said “we haven’t heard much about his foreign policy, but he says that’ll be coming a little later after he’s learned the names of all the countries.”

OV: What do you think of him?

AF: Politically, I think he’s triangulating like Clinton, so he is a conservative, but he’s smart enough to know that the Gingrich paradigm doesn’t work. So he’s moving to the center, he believes he has the nomination so he’s staking out the center.

OV: Do you think he has the nomination?

AF: Oh, yeah. I mean who else? I think the only one who I could conceivably see getting the nomination is [Senator John] McCain, but I can’t even see that because Republicans don’t nominate mavericks. He’s just got it, unless he really screws up.

OV: Do you like McCain?

AF: I just read his autobiography and I like that a lot. I think he’s admirable in many, many ways. He has certainly been courageous on tobacco and campaign finance reform. I read the book and it has a lot about his time in captivity in North Vietnam being tortured and stuff. I don’t understand why all this war hero stuff. I mean anybody can get captured. Isn’t the idea to capture the other guy? As far as I’m concerned, he sat out the war.

OV: Were you sad to see Dan Quayle leave the race?

AF: No, I can’t get it up to make a Dan Quayle joke, you know what I mean? It bores me. I think he’s a nice guy, and he’s supposed to be smarter than people think. That’s what you hear. I kind of felt sorry for him during this thing. No one held a gun to his head and said “you have to run for president,” but still he was beaten by Alan Keyes in the straw poll, and that’s wrong. He was the vice president! Everybody ahead of him had not held elective office, except for Bush. Keyes, Bauer, Buchanan, Dole and Forbes. I didn’t have the heart to do it; the day after the straw pole, I was sitting with some Forbes people at the airport at a snack bar or something, and a couple of tables away there are the Quayle people. And they were kind of really despondent, you know. So I start asking the Forbes people should I go over to their table and say, “You know what I think really helped? That vice president thing. ‘Cause I think without the vice president thing, frankly you would have gotten dick.”

OV: But you decided not to?

AF: I was a better human being for not doing it, and for just making the Forbes people laugh.

OV: What are your thoughts on Pat Buchanan fleeing to the Reform party?

AF: That’ll keep him around longer. They don’t give their nomination until next August or September or something. I’m one of these people who has met him, and when you meet him he’s charming. I met him in ’88 at the democratic convention in Atlanta because I was doing commentary for CNN and we shared the same work area. So I came back to New York, and I told some of my friends “Pat Buchanan is very charming.” And a couple of my friends said, “Yeah, well Goebbels was charming,” which is really unfair because Goebbels wasn’t charming. Goebbels was an ill-tempered backbiter. Check your history. There isn’t a Nazi war criminal he doesn’t like or hasn’t defended. At one point he was defending Demjanjuk, who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka. He said that there were some Soviet documents, of course Pat Buchanan trusting Soviet documents is a funny thing, which said Demjanjuk was a guard at Sibibor. And so his defense of Demjanjuk, who he said shouldn’t be deported by the way, was how could he have been a guard at Treblinka if he was guard at Sibibor? (laughs) I thought at the time maybe Buchanan was for “three strikes and you’re out” because he thought that it meant to put a Nazi war criminal away he had to be a guard at three separate camps.

OV: So I suppose I don’t need to ask you whether or not you think he’s an anti-Semite.

AF: I think he is, and I don’t know if he knows he is.

OV: Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot attacked every facet of the conservative right, while Why Not Me? is more of a self-parody that goes after the left.

AF: It basically goes after the whole ritual of running for president, and it goes after very specific things too, like [Bob] Woodward. I was told in Iowa that a number of the campaigns have given the cassettes, the book on tape, to their workers out in the field so that when they’re driving they can listen to it because it does resonate with them. They’ve been listening to it very early on because a lot of the book is about that period in a campaign when it’s so dormant, when you’re doing that early work. Which is a fascinating period to me because if you’re Lamar Alexander and you’re running for president, it’s just depressing. You’re only meeting a few people, especially for him getting no traction. I think the early part is hilarious just from the amount of wasted time sitting around. You know I’ve seen that in a couple of places where I’ve been around a guy running for president very early on, and it just strikes me as funny how much space there is between things,

OV: Did you consciously want to do something different with Why Not Me?

AF: I think that with the Rush thing I kind of covered the right; I didn’t want to do it again. And when I wrote the Rush thing they were sort of ascendant, I was writing it in ’95, it came out in early ’96. So they, Gingrich, Limbaugh and all those guys, were riding very high, and by the time I started writing this one they had been pretty much discredited. I just thought it would be more fun to write something different. I didn’t want the same kind of thing — a book of essays on how I feel about politics. I didn’t have the same kind of handle and the same kind of outrage that I had. The Rush thing had such a strong rooting interest for people it just flew out of the stores. It was unbelievable. I mean people were buying it for furniture, just to put on the coffee table.

OV: So why make yourself the center of things?

AF: Well, you know people would say “who’s gonna be the asshole this time?” Well, me. I just thought the idea of the authorized campaign autobiography is a very funny part of any presidential campaign, and I thought it would be funny to take what people knew about my life and try to write it as if I was an idiot trying to spin it the way they do. And then I thought it would be fun to show a campaign as it really is from the standpoint of this awful guy, this awful asshole running and the media not catching it. It’s the kind of thing where we don’t really catch up with how bad the guy is until he’s in office. And I really did want to write about that part of the campaign where it isn’t debates and primaries, it’s more trying to get some traction and get your team together and I thought it would be fun to put a really bad team together.

OV: Why Not Me? pokes fun at the President’s problems. Are you still a Clinton supporter?

AF: I am, and I think he’s been a good president. He really, really screwed up very badly. There’s just no doubt about it. I don’t think he should have been impeached. I think Ken Starr is just an awful guy and clueless, and I really, really hate the Bob Barrs of the world. But I think what the president did was obviously inexcusable, in many ways (laughs). I’m hoping that after he leaves office he’ll be more willing to work on himself and see what he did. I mean it was ridiculous. And he hurt people, like me, who believe in him and really wanted him to be a great president, which I think he’s capable of being. I don’t think we’ve had a guy as talented in so many different ways in a long, long time.

OV: Do you ever worry about offending friends or family when you include them as characters in your book?

AF: Nah. A number of people who read the book would go “Did Franni [Franken’s wife] read this?” But she’s just used to it. There’s sort of a tradition in comedy of comedians doing the wife joke, and I like being part of that tradition (laughs). She thinks it’s funny, and she gets it. She has to reassure people every once and awhile — the guy at the video store “no, no, it’s okay.”

OV: Who is your least favorite Republican?

AF: Bob Barr springs to mind; he’s just such an ugly guy, I mean ugly in his heart. Gingrich at least is smarter than Barr, and more interesting than Barr, and more visionary. Visionary? I don’t know if that’s the word. You kind of miss Gingrich because at least there were ideas out there. Buchanan [now of the Reform Party] is as I said charming, but I do believe he is anti-Semitic and has some really awful ideas. I tell this joke where I say Gore’s been taking a lot of hits for saying he invented the Internet, but it seems a lot of the other candidates have learned from it. For example, Buchanan said yesterday that he invented gay baiting. And it’s not true because it’s actually hundreds of years old. His ideas are pretty awful. Although, as I said, you’d like him (laughs). It’s the craziest thing.

OV: Was political satire a big part of your job at “Saturday Night Live?”

AF: Yeah. One of the great things about writing for a live TV show is you can address what happened that week. Most of the political stuff, during the years that I was there, I had some hand in at least. I wrote other kinds of stuff, but it was always fun to write political stuff.

OV: What political affiliation would Stuart Smalley have?

AF: Stuart is apolitical, although he admires Ghandi. Though a woman in his Overeaters Anonymous group told him that Ghandi had an eating disorder, but you know, no one’s perfect.

OV: What do you think of the current cast of SNL?

AF: I like the cast, I like it a lot. I like Will Ferrel; I like Anna Gasteyer, Tim Meadows is a friend of mine. I think that, as has been the case for a while now, there might be too much cast. People aren’t required to do as much, don’t get a chance to do as much as when we had seven cast members in the original group.

OV: If you were going to trim someone who would it be?

AF: No, no, no. It’s not about that. It’s not about that somebody is weak or something. It’s suddenly you’re playing a smaller range of characters, and it’s fun to see Gilda play a little girl, it’s fun to see Danny play a father.

OV: What do you think of the rise of Jesse Ventura?

AF: Well, you know I’m from Minnesota. I was raised in Minnesota from 4 to 18, and we are so proud. As for the Playboy interview, the thing about organized religion being a sham, what I really liked about that was his defense, (adopting sarcastic Ventura drawl) “I was, I was being honest . . . at least I was being honest,” which I don’t get it. I mean as if you say “The governor of Minnesota should be allowed to have sex with minors. Hey, I’m just being honest. What’s wrong?” And then the 38DD bra he’d like to come back as . . . again, we’re just so proud.

OV: In the past, you said you would never run for public office. Is that still true?

AF: Well, it’s funny, I kind of said that because of some of my drug history. It’s one thing I can thank George Bush for; I now realize that it’s not disqualifying.