Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Throughout grade school and junior high, I continued to be a good student and something of a comedian. I wasn’t the “class clown” so much as a sly, observational comic. If I found a teacher, like Mr. Knutsen in sixth grade, who dug my stuff, I’d play to the teacher. If I didn’t like the teacher, like my eighth-grade civics teacher, also named Mr. Knutsen, I’d work the room at his expense. I think he sent me to stand in the hall about a dozen times during the school year.

  After ninth grade, Mom and Dad threw me a curve. Owen was now at MIT, and was therefore the Franken family expert on college. He told my parents that the students at MIT were wonks and nerds, and that I should go to Harvard. Owen also said that I should switch out of the St. Louis Park public school system and go to Blake, a country day private school in an adjacent suburb, because the wonks and nerds at MIT who had gone to private school were better prepared.

  I didn’t hear about this conversation until years later. All I knew at the time was what Dad told me, which was, “You’re going to take a test to go to a school for smart kids.”

  Ever obedient, I said, “Okay.” A few days later, Dad drove me to the beautiful Blake campus, where I took the test.

  A couple weeks later, Dad told me, “You passed the test to get into the school for smart kids.”

  I spent the next three years at Blake.* All in all, I had a pretty good experience, even if I was permanently scarred by going to an all-boys school. But, again, I’ll save that for a heartwrenching chapter in The Sorrow and the Gavel, “Escape from the Cloakroom.”

  It turned out that there were a lot of really smart kids at Blake and some not so smart, kind of like St. Louis Park High School, where you didn’t have to pay a lot of money, and could interact on a daily basis with members of the opposite sex during a crucial developmental period of your life. Still, I found my way.

  Blake had all the elements of a British boarding school in a novel or movie, except we were just a bunch of goofy midwestern kids who went home at night. But the stuffy vestiges of an outdated model for schooling boys gave a number of us something to rebel against. Or, at the very least, to make fun of.

  Tom Davis was a year behind me at Blake. I didn’t meet him until he did an announcement with a group of other boys one morning in chapel. I don’t remember what it was for—probably a meeting of the Glee Club or something. (I’m kicking myself for not taking notes during my childhood.) All I remember is thinking, “That guy’s really funny!”

  I made it a point to go up to Tom and introduce myself. The comedy team of Franken and Davis was born.

  Chapel became our stage. We did announcements for practically every organization in school, borrowing moves from comics we both loved: Johnny Carson, Soupy Sales, Jack Benny, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers, George Carlin, Godfrey Cambridge, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, and Laurel and Hardy. We traded off being the straight man and the funny guy. We did a lot of physical comedy and threw in not-so-veiled barbs aimed at the school. But mainly we just did goofy stuff, like parodies of the hit movie Cool Hand Luke (“Anyone who doesn’t go to homecoming spends a night in the box!”).

  We’d write in each other’s basements. Well, in my house it was a basement. In Tom’s house it was a finished family room. At the time, Tom’s dad, Don Davis, was a handsome midlevel executive at 3M. Tom’s beautiful, sweet mom, Jean Davis, the former Jean Johnson, had been the 1950 Queen of the Lakes. Besides Tom, Don and Jean Davis had another son, Bob, who was three years younger. So that was Don, Jean, Tom, and Bob.

  Jean loved hearing me and Tom laughing from down in their finished basement. “Oh, you boys are so funny!” she’d say, and bring us some treats.

  But as the middle ’60s turned into the late ’60s, things started getting tense around the Davis household. Don, as Tom himself described him in his memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, was “a lifelong kneejerk Republican” and “the uptight son of an alcoholic.” In fact, Don’s father, Tom’s grandfather, drank himself to death. As Tom grew his hair and discovered pot, rock and roll, and girls, all the ingredients were there for the classic Oedipal battle common to so many suburban baby boomers.

  Don didn’t like Franken and Davis one bit. So Tom started spending more and more time at my house. Once Tom returned to his home after a couple days with the Frankens to find a newspaper clipping taped to his bedroom wall. The headline:

  STUDENT TAKES LSD, CUTS OFF OWN PENIS

  Things were getting a little tense at school as well. Our chapel material got edgier, to the point where we were ruffling some feathers. So we turned our attention to pep fests that were parodies of pep fests—hanging the other team in effigy and repeatedly clubbing the dummy in the crotch with a baseball bat. The football coach, Mr. Mezzenga, seemed to like it, though I’m not sure he was taking it at the same ironic level that the team and the rest of the students were.*

  Meanwhile, Tom and I discovered a comedy revue theater in Minneapolis called Dudley Riggs’s Brave New Workshop. We saw actual adults onstage doing pretty much what we wanted to do—make audiences laugh.

  We started hanging out at the Workshop, getting to know the performers and the impresario, Dudley Riggs, a former vaudevillian and circus performer. Dudley took a liking to us and suggested we come to an open stage night and do ten minutes. So we did.

  We led off with a local newscast on the night of the day of World War III:

  AL: Tragedy, death, catastrophe highlight tonight’s news at ten! I’m Ray Thompson, substituting for the deceased Chet Newholm. And now with the weather, meteorologist Bob Carlson.

  TOM: Well, don’t grab those umbrellas just yet… temperatures up to six thousand degrees tonight. Winds gusting at five hundred miles per hour with occasional firestorms. Back to you, Ray.

  AL: The stock market closed today—for good.

  We got solid laughs, and Dudley told us he “saw sparks.” By the summer we were doing one show a week at the Workshop. Also, we got paid! (A little.) Tom and I were professional comedians!

  At the end of that summer I went off to college, still intent, I thought, on pursuing a career in science. In the back of my mind, show business didn’t seem like a secure career choice for someone from Minnesota, though Bob Dylan had been kind of tearing it up in the ’60s there. And unlike Bob Dylan, the poor loser, I had gotten into Harvard. (I guess Dylan didn’t test well.)

  Unfortunately, by the end of my first semester of college, I could tell I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist. Even though we had just beaten them to the moon, the Soviets were still something of a problem—but I knew my heart wasn’t in it.

  Franni encouraged me to go to the counseling office, where I was given an extensive personality test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, to see what career I was psychologically suited for.*

  The results were very interesting. The number one career match for Alan Franken was “jazz musician.” Number two was “camp counselor.” Coming in dead last? “Scientist.”

  Since I didn’t play a musical instrument and had never been to an overnight summer camp, I decided the one-two combo pointed to either “jazz camp counselor,” which sounded like an unimaginable bummer, or “comedian,” a career that was not on the Minnesota Multiphasic list, but which I had been preparing for pretty much all my life.

  Years later, Dana Carvey said to me, “There’s no reason to be a comedian unless you absolutely have to be.” He didn’t mean that comedians weren’t able to do any other job. It’s just that, to be a comedian, comedy has to be the thing you absolutely have to do. Like a jazz musician has to be a jazz musician. (And maybe some camp counselors just have to be camp counselors.) It wasn’t until that stupid Minnesota Multiphasic that I felt like I had permission to pursue the career I actually had to pursue.

  Now, this was the early ’70s, and there was this war in Southeast Asia. I got a 2-S student deferment, which kept me out of the draft until graduation. In its wisdom, the government felt it was important
for me to continue my studies so I could pursue my chosen profession—comedian—and keep America strong. I ended up majoring in behavioral sciences—sociology, anthropology, and psychology—which has actually been helpful in the Senate (and might have been useful in Vietnam).

  Summers, I worked with Tom at Dudley’s by night, and by day for the St. Louis Park Street Department, where I worked on a crew with two other college guys. Our job was to mow weeds around water towers and other public buildings with industrial-sized mowers.

  Though Tom was an avid reader, he was at best an indifferent student. After two years at the University of the Pacific, including a sophomore year during which he traveled through India and Nepal to study smoking hashish, he dropped out and became a cast member at Dudley’s and a wonderfully inventive and hilarious improvisational comedian. Still, we’d do our two-man shows during the summer. One night, I got a horrible migraine after working all day in the sun. We went on with the show, but I had to bolt backstage to throw up, leaving Tom to improvise for a minute or two. The audience figured out what was going on because I looked horrible, and at the end of the show they gave us a standing ovation.

  Dudley watched the show from the back of the house and came backstage afterward to commend us. I was lying facedown on a couch, but Tom asked him, “What would have happened if Al had thrown up onstage?”

  “Oh, they would have all walked out,” he said with the total assurance of a showbiz veteran who had seen everything.

  Between my junior and senior years, Tom and I hitchhiked from Minneapolis to L.A. (kids, don’t do this) to perform at the Comedy Store. Our twenty minutes killed, and suddenly we were on the radar of our contemporaries—struggling comedians trying to get a break.

  During my senior year, Tom came out to Cambridge and stayed in my dorm room. He smoked pot, played Frisbee, and didn’t go to classes, and thus was often mistaken for a student. On weekends, Tom and I would drive two or three marginally more prosperous students down to Manhattan in exchange for gas money and perform at the Improvisation with comedians like Jay Leno, Robert Klein, and Andy Kaufman.

  In 1973, Franni and I graduated, and the three of us drove out to Hollywood. Tom and I played the Comedy Store (where Franni worked as a cocktail waitress) and a few other clubs around L.A. Occasionally we’d go on the road and play colleges in the Midwest for five hundred bucks a gig.

  One spring we did a show at Huron State in South Dakota. As we drove up to the student union, we noticed there were no cars. They had booked us during spring break. There were a grand total of seven students remaining on campus who couldn’t make it home for the break. Six were African American guys from the East Coast. Tom asked them why there were six of them, and one said wryly, “In case one of us fouls out.”

  The other kid was a very depressed junior who had been caught smoking pot during his sophomore year and as punishment was confined to campus for the remainder of his college career, except for summers. Tom and I did our show for the seven bummed-out students and a custodian. They were actually a pretty good audience.

  We were doing a lot of political material back in those days, including lots and lots of Nixon stuff. I’d play Nixon to Tom’s David Eisenhower,* and then Tom would play Nixon to my Henry Kissinger. We ate a lot of rice and beans and did odd jobs. During Christmas season, we’d alternate playing Santa and Winnie-the-Pooh at a Sears in North Hollywood (Sears had declined to let us play Nixon).

  When you’re starting out in comedy, you meet a lot of other people doing the same thing, and you influence each other. A comedy writer friend of ours, Matt Neuman, grew up in New York and had collected hours of Bob and Ray on reel-to-reel audiotape. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were a radio comedy team in New York from the 1950s through the ’80s who developed a cult following of generations of fans, from Groucho Marx to Johnny Carson to David Letterman. Tom and I had seen Bob and Ray a few times on The Tonight Show and were fans ourselves.

  Listening to hours of these Bob and Ray tapes, Tom and I heard both what we had been trying to do and what we wanted to become. Like them, neither of us were exclusively the straight man nor the funny guy. They were dry, and gently subversive, committed to their characters—various gasbags, self-serving idiots, and absurdly banal authorities. Tom and I would sit with Matt, smoking dope and laughing our asses off at Bob’s mild-mannered reporter Wally Ballou, who promoted himself as “radio’s highly regarded Wally Ballou, winner of eleven diction awards, two of which are cuff links.” On shows like “Widen Your Horizons” with sponsors like “Einbinder Flypaper, the name you’ve gradually grown to trust over three generations,” Bob would interview Ray, an expert on how to floss, who would point out that to floss properly you don’t actually have to have one hand inside your mouth.

  When I first got to the Senate, I discovered that Kansas senator Pat Roberts, a very funny archconservative (but one you can work with) and fifteen years my senior, is a huge Bob and Ray fan. One day, early on, I brought over a CD I’d made from some of Matt’s tapes to Pat’s office, and we laughed and laughed. I never asked Pat if he had ever listened to them while smoking dope. Frankly, it’s none of my damn business.

  Franni and I had smoked pot in college, but Tom introduced us to LSD and the Grateful Dead—I think in the reverse order. We’d drive around California in our Volkswagen bus following the Dead—so we were in danger of being a cliché. Years later, though, I’d bond with Vermont senator Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, over our love of the Dead. I didn’t even have to ask Leahy whether he had ever dropped acid. After all, he started his career as a prosecutor.

  So, Tom and I were Deadheads, and Bob-and-Ray-heads.

  We were beginning to get noticed. And I’ll always remember the moment I knew we’d made it.

  It was December 1974, and we were offered the chance to be part of a show at Harrah’s Casino in Reno called The Boob Tube Revue. No, that wasn’t the moment. The Boob Tube Revue was pretty awful. What? You could tell from the name it was awful? Still, the awful show was popular, and Franken and Davis were something of a hit in Reno.

  One night, management decided to throw a party to honor the cast of The Boob Tube Revue. And that’s where I saw it: an enormous platter holding a gigantic mound of jumbo shrimp.

  Let me explain: For my dad, the worst part of moving to Minnesota in 1955 was that he loved seafood—especially clams, softshell crabs, lobster, and shrimp. In the 1950s and ’60s, you simply could not get fresh seafood in Minnesota. Every summer, we’d all drive to New York to visit my uncle Erwin and his family, and the biggest treat for me was the seafood. I remember thinking, “I’ll know I’ll have made it when I can eat as much shrimp as I want.”

  That evening in Reno, I probably ate three dozen jumbo shrimp. So as far as I was concerned, I had made it well before Tom and I got hired for Saturday Night Live.

  Chapter 3

  Saturday Night Live (Not the Drug Part)

  In the spring of 1975, a William Morris agent named Herb Karp saw Franken and Davis at the Comedy Store and asked us to put together a writing sample.

  We knew we weren’t right for the few comedy-variety shows on TV at that time. The Carol Burnett Show was terrific, but from another generation. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, though slightly superior to The Boob Tube Revue, was, well, dreck. So Tom and I wrote a fourteen-page submission for a hypothetical show we’d like to work for. It included a news segment (our World War III newscast), a sketch about a bad variety show, a commercial parody, and the script for a short conceptual film. Even now, almost fifty years later, I still harbor the faint hope that someone, somewhere, will someday do a show like that.

  A few months later, a thirty-year-old producer named Lorne Michaels read our writing sample for a new late-night show he was putting together. We got the word that we’d been hired from Herb late on a Friday afternoon after playing basketball with some other unemployed comedians in Hollywood: “Be at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Monday.”

&n
bsp; Of the writers hired for the original SNL staff, Tom and I were the only ones Lorne hadn’t met. Dick Ebersol, then the network exec in charge of late night, wanted to hire another team, who were from New York, in order to save NBC the airfare. But Lorne insisted on us.

  Tom and I came as a team, and since this was our first job in TV, NBC got a waiver from the Writers Guild to allow them to pay us as a single apprentice writer. We couldn’t have been happier.

  When we arrived on Monday, July 7, 1975, the first colleague we met was Mike O’Donoghue, already legendary for his hilariously dark work as a founding writer of the National Lampoon. As the three of us waited for clearance at the elevator bank, Mike sized us up and asked Tom and me what we were being paid. We told him we were sharing three hundred and fifty bucks a week. Mike snickered. “I spend that much to shine my cats’ shoes.” Tom and I were delighted.

  We soon met some of the other writers, including Chevy Chase and Garrett Morris, who were yet to be named cast members. At that point, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, whom Lorne knew from Toronto, and Laraine Newman, who had performed at the Groundlings, an improv-based theater in L.A., were the only cast members. A week or so later, John Belushi, a Second City vet, arrived at the audition as his Samurai character and blew the room away. John and Jane Curtin, who came from the Proposition in Boston, yet another improv-based theater, rounded out the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

  Lorne had bargained with NBC for a long preproduction period. Part of the idea was to give us time to write a lot and start forging a common sensibility as a staff. During preproduction, Tom and I would meet periodically with Lorne in his office to go over something we’d written. He’d always ask us the same question: “Is this the best piece you’ve ever written?” We’d say no, and then Lorne would tell us to keep working on it until it was.