Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Finally, one of us, and I’m guessing it was Tom, figured out that not everything you write can be the best thing you’ve ever written. Lorne dropped that particular gambit after that, but over the years, every so often we would write the best thing we’d ever written.

  Tom and I got the sense that Lorne was looking out for us. He himself had started in Toronto as part of a team, Hart and Lorne, and I think he appreciated the bond between us. Around the show, Tom and I were “the Boys.” Even if just one of us walked into the room, someone would say, “The Boys are here.”

  The first show was scheduled for October 11, 1975. As the premiere approached, I grew increasingly confident that we were all on board a giant hit. It was the first time that baby boomers had been allowed to do TV, and the people around me were among the most talented writers and comedians of our generation.

  When I look back on that youthful arrogance, I laugh. This was our first real job in show business. Hits almost never happen. But Tom and I had gotten a raise, and Franni and Tom’s girlfriend, Lucy, drove east from California with our belongings because we were confident that we had a long-term job.

  On October 2, 1975, nine days before the first Saturday Night Live ever, Franni and I eloped and were married at City Hall in lower Manhattan.*

  Of course, I had been correct as a brash, overconfident twenty-four-year-old. The show was pretty much an instant hit. Over the decades, SNL has gone through periods of sustained brilliance and a few rough patches, but after forty-two years, the show has been a touchstone for generations of overentertained, underinformed Americans.

  Lorne started putting Franken and Davis in front of the camera every once in a while. We’d be part of the dress rehearsal, and if enough stuff in dress tanked, he’d put us on the air. Our first appearance was on a show hosted by Elliott Gould. We did a bit from our act called “The Bureau of White Man Affairs.” The premise was simple: “What if the Indians had won?”

  I played the host of Pow Wow with the Press, Howard K. Screaming Eagle, and Tom played the chief of the Bureau of White Man Affairs, both wearing suits and fedoras with a feather sticking out. The topic: recent complaints over racially insensitive team nicknames in Major League Lacrosse, such as the Milwaukee Dagos.

  TOM: We had a big uproar about a week ago over an insignia on a bubblegum card for the Cleveland Kikes. They objected to the little screaming rabbi.

  AL: Well, can’t these names be offensive to white people?

  TOM: Ahh, no. No. These are white man names that the white man uses himself to ridicule each other’s tribe.

  AL: I didn’t know that.

  TOM: Well, the Dago is an Italian, whom we know are a stupid, violent, greasy people. They wear black, pointy moccasins. And Kike is a Jew… Jew white man, and he’s the most shrewd of all white men, as you probably know.

  AL: Yes, as I understand it, the Jew white man really knows the value of a buffalo chip.

  It was Bob and Ray—with an edge.*

  When people come up to me to talk about Saturday Night Live, they almost always mention my on-camera work, whether it was our Franken and Davis show-within-the-show, the Al Franken Decade, my One-Man Mobile Uplink Unit, or Stuart Smalley.

  But at the end of the day, Tom and I were writers. And because we were part of a great writing staff with a cast that included gifted writers, like Chevy and Danny, and performers who could create hilarious characters for themselves, like Billy Murray’s lounge singer or Gilda’s Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, Tom and I collaborated together and separately with others on the show.

  Of the original cast, Danny was the one we teamed up with the most. He and Tom created the Coneheads after taking a trip together to Easter Island. Tom and I wrote Danny as Julia Child bleeding to death after cutting herself deboning a chicken. We collaborated with him on sleazy characters like Irwin Mainway, purveyor of dangerous toys for kids, like Bag o’ Glass. Danny played two presidents with his mustache: a hypercompetent Jimmy Carter early in his term, taking phone calls with Bill Murray’s Walter Cronkite and masterfully talking down a young man on a bad acid trip (played by Tom, of course), and an inebriated Nixon talking to White House portraits during those stormy Final Days.

  I worked with so many talented men and women going through exhilarating but also sometimes very difficult periods of their lives. Putting on a live ninety-minute comedy show week after week can be thrilling, and it can be painfully stressful. And of course, we were all of a very tender age. People had sex and fell in love. But mostly had sex. I personally had 227 sexual encounters during my fifteen years at SNL. All of them with Franni.

  A show week at SNL was kind of crazy. On Monday, around 5 p.m., the cast and writing staff would crowd into Lorne’s office, where we’d meet the host. Lorne would introduce him or her: “This week our host is Burt Reynolds.” We’d applaud politely. Then I’d yell excitedly, “And next week, Steve Martin!!!” We’d all cheer and go nuts. Welcome to the show, Burt!

  During the meeting, writers and cast would pitch ideas. Most of them were half-baked at best. Sometimes they were fake ideas, just to cover for the fact that you had nothing. You could see the terror growing in the host’s eyes as he/she heard lame idea after lame idea.

  But the meeting served a purpose. Often, someone’s idea would spark one of your own. After the meeting, things would start percolating. “I liked that VD Caseworker idea. What if you did this with it…?” During SNL’s life span, the show has been at its best when there’s been an equilibrium between the writing staff and the cast. When the cast dominates, we see popular recurring characters beaten into the ground. When the writers dominate, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that the audience doesn’t find all that interesting or all that funny.

  Read-through was on Wednesday afternoon. So Tuesday night was writing night. As the season wore on, we’d start later and later, and soon Tuesday night became an all-nighter.

  Woody Allen once said that writing comedy is either easy or it’s impossible. When it’s easy, there is nothing more fun. Conversely, when it’s impossible, there is nothing quite as anxiety-provoking. To this day, I still have nightmares that it’s a Tuesday night at SNL and I cannot think of a thing.

  After read-through, Lorne would huddle with the host and production staff to decide what sketches were going to be put into rehearsal. This was a complex calculus: What works? What does the host like? What sketches bump with each other? You can’t have two Oval Office pieces. What combination of sets will fit into the studio? How many cast members are being served by the material?

  Lorne put the writers in charge of guiding their own piece through the week. Essentially, writers were the producers of their own sketches. That meant hanging around after read-through to answer any questions Lorne or the production staff might have. Can we recast this? Can you put it in a smaller set? Talk to Eugene or Leo, the set designers.

  Thursday was for promos and camera blocking. You’d work with graphics, makeup, and hair, maybe props. The “satellite dish” mounted on the helmet for my One-Man Mobile Uplink Unit was a “flying saucer” sled with a basketball pump sticking out.

  Thursday night was a late night as well. Writers would sit around the read-through table rewriting. Usually, sketches were improved, often with the most memorable jokes coming from the table. Rob Schneider wrote a piece called “Massive Headwound Harry” about a cheery guy (Dana Carvey) with a massive head wound who bums out everyone at a party because of his massive head wound. During the Thursday late-night rewrite session, Tom came up with the idea of rubbing Dana’s bandage with cooked shrimp and having a blind guy with a guide dog enter at the end. Sure enough, the dog found Dana sitting on the couch and tugged the bandage. As the dog kept tugging, the audience howled with laughter, Dana finally cheerily saying, “He must smell my dog.”

  Sometimes everyone knew a sketch was shaky at best, but we’d do our best to make it work. That was known as “turd polishing.” It could be a tough room. In the we
e hours, things could get pretty dark and raunchy. Around the time that the term “hostile work environment” came into the lexicon, Christine Zander, a one-of-a-kind writer with the world’s best Gatling-gun laugh who worked at the show for seven seasons, developed a running joke for just these occasions: “Dear Lawsuit Diary.”

  Friday was a very long day of rehearsal. And it often included writing something new for the cold opening—the sketch at the beginning that ends with “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” The benefit of doing a live comedy show is that you can react to breaking news. The drawback is that you have to react to breaking news. If the country learns on a Friday that the surgeon general said that teaching masturbation to kids is a good idea, you better have a take on Saturday.

  On Saturday morning some of us would come in to write jokes for “Weekend Update.” Then a full day of rehearsals, hopefully (but almost never) running through every sketch of the show. Then dinner, while the music guest did a sound check and a run-through for cameras. Then dress rehearsal at eight, ending at 9:50, meaning we’re twenty minutes over. A quick turnaround. Lorne decides what’s in, what’s out. You want your sketch in? Lose two minutes!

  Quick meeting in Lorne’s ninth-floor office, where everyone sees the new running order. Some cast and writers are elated, some devastated. Lorne gives notes in shorthand. The writers call out cuts and rewrites. Cast absorbs them. Have a good show, everybody! Cue cards make the changes. Cast gets into wardrobe and wigs. The band is playing warm-up for the studio audience. It’s 11:30!

  Maybe the studio audience is hot and laughing at everything. We need more cuts. Or maybe the audience isn’t laughing. Maybe that’s because we have a hot band and their fans got tickets because they all know someone who has an uncle who works in ad sales at NBC. Put that sequence back in this sketch. No? Doesn’t make sense with the other cuts? Okay, let’s run a commercial parody after “Massive Headwound Harry.”

  The show ends at 1 a.m. The cast get out of their costumes and makeup and roll around to the after-party at some restaurant around 1:45. It’s hard to come down from the adrenaline of performing live for ten million Americans. Two or three hours of discussing what worked and what didn’t. Introducing your friends from back home to George Harrison. At some point, the sun comes up.

  You stumble home, sleep till two in the afternoon, read the Sunday Times, catch some football, and have dinner with your boyfriend or girlfriend, or in my case, your wife.* Your clock is all screwed up, so around midnight Sunday night, you start thinking of new ideas for next week.

  And then it all starts again Monday morning. Okay, Monday afternoon. Okay, Monday evening. But Monday.

  Chapter 4

  Saturday Night Live (The Drug Part)

  Actually, now that I look at the show schedule, it was certainly no busier than being in the Senate. As at SNL, we senators get recesses, but Senate recesses aren’t really breaks. They’re just periods of time where we’re doing different kinds of work, like traveling around our states meeting with people, or raising money, or going overseas on the jam-packed congressional trips known as CODELs (congressional delegations).*

  Either way, senators certainly do a lot less drugs than we did at SNL. Unless I’m just completely clueless.

  As SNL became a cultural sensation, it began to leak out that some of the cast and writers at the show were smoking dope and snorting cocaine. At first, there was some official denial. “You can’t do a ninety-minute live comedy show week after week and do cocaine,” we’d say, and it sounded convincing, at least for a while.

  The truth is that many on the show thought that you can’t do a ninety-minute live comedy show week after week without doing cocaine. Which, of course, is folderol.USS

  Until John Belushi’s death, we at SNL didn’t really understand that drugs can kill you. But by the time Chris Farley got in trouble, we at the show understood all too well.

  A couple years after John was found dead of an overdose at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (and Woodward and Bernstein fame) wrote a book called Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. During his research phase, I had agreed to be interviewed by Woodward, but I didn’t like the tone of his questions, which seemed to be only about drug use. So I told him that the only time I had seen John snort coke was with Carl Bernstein. Which wasn’t true, but it cut the interview short.

  When Wired came out, we all hated it. Not because it chronicled John’s drug abuse, but because that was more or less all it covered. Tom said it was like if someone titled your college yearbook Puked, and all it talked about was who puked, and when they puked, and what they puked: No one read Dickens for the first time, no one learned chemistry, no one fell in love. Everybody just puked.

  The book made no attempt to capture why John was so funny, what his influence was as an improvisational comedian, and how magnetic he was as a person and a performer. Woodward, who has of course written authoritatively about Washington, seemed obstinately tone-deaf to the world he was writing about. Lorne said it was as if he wrote a book about rock and roll and referred to “the Beatles, a popular British band of the ’60s.”

  There was no one who knew Chris Farley who didn’t love him. In no small part that was because Chris was not just an extraordinarily committed, explosively hilarious performer, but also such a genuine fan of everyone else’s work.

  Chris struggled mightily with his addiction—he must have gone to a dozen rehabs—but ultimately couldn’t beat it.

  After Chris returned to the show from yet another stint at rehab, I created a character for him called “The Relapse Guy.” The sketch starts with the exit session at the rehab before a patient goes home. Tim Meadows, the counselor, assures the family (Phil Hartman, Julia Sweeney, Mike Myers, and guest host Shannen Doherty) that this time Chris has finally gotten it, which they clearly are not buying. Tim tells them that the rehab has gotten Chris a job—as an organ courier. CUT TO: the operating room, where the doctor and his transplant team are waiting impatiently for the liver, which is hours late. Enter Chris, drunk out of his mind. He opens the cooler, pulling out a prepackaged calf’s liver from a supermarket meat case, and hands it to the doctor before he passes out, collapsing on the patient on the operating table. Chris loved it. Every few weeks, he would ask me, “How about another ‘Relapse Guy’?”

  That was Chris. And, really, that’s dark comedy: a guy who couldn’t get clean doing a sketch about a guy who couldn’t get clean. And we probably all found it funnier precisely because so many of us had seen the damage addiction can do, not just when it costs people their lives, but as it destroys their careers and hurts the ones they care about most.

  For my part, I never really got into trouble with drugs. I used to say, “I only did cocaine so I could stay up late enough to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine,” which was a joke, but not too far from the truth. For whatever reason, I never became addicted. There but for the grace of God go I.

  But the thing about addiction is, you don’t have to be the addict to be affected. And my life has been profoundly affected by substance abuse because two of the most important people in my life struggled with addiction. But it took me a long time to realize that.

  I grew up in a household that consumed very little alcohol. My first drink came during my freshman year in college, when my roommate Dave Griffin and I split a fifth of scotch and got stupid drunk and threw up a great deal.

  So I was pretty clueless about what was going on when Franken and Davis would go on the road and Tom would always want to go to a bar before the gig. I’d sit with him, going over our act, thinking, “I wonder what Tom sees in this place? It’s so boring. Why in the world does Tom like going to bars?”

  We had a lot more time to spend on the road after 1980, when we followed Lorne out the door at SNL. We went back to doing our act, including a Franken and Davis special for Showtime, writing some TV and some screenplays, and playing baggage handlers in
Trading Places. Tom got high more and more. But he was still my partner. And my best friend. When Franni and I had a daughter, we named her Thomasin Davis Franken.

  Then, in 1985, Lorne came back to the show. He brought me and Tom back, along with a few other “Lorne Again” writers. Lorne asked the two of us to produce the show, and we jumped at the opportunity. But Lorne, on a youth kick, hired a group of talented but very young cast members, like the twenty-year-old Robert Downey Jr. and seventeen-year-old Anthony Michael Hall, who were not suited to the kinds of sketches SNL had done before—you know, sketches where cast members play adults.

  The reviews were scathing. Since 1976, year two of SNL, we had all lived with “Saturday Night Dead” reviews, but that season we deserved it. With Tom routinely disappearing and me presiding over endless rewrite sessions and trying to hold the show together, I felt overwhelmed.

  Meanwhile, at home, after more than a decade of happy marriage, Franni and I were having trouble. After our second child, Joe, was born, Franni fell into a postpartum depression, which she secretly medicated with alcohol. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

  After the disastrous 1985–86 season, Tom and I decided to leave the show again. We’d go back to doing our act and working on screenplays. But in September 1986, Franni’s drinking came to be just too much. She had been going through her own kind of hell, trying as hard as she could to both be a good mother and keep her drinking problem a secret. And, thank God, she went to rehab.

  Taking care of a five-year-old Thomasin and an almost-two-year-old Joe, I needed a steady job in New York. I asked Lorne if I could come back to the show. He said, “Of course.”

  After getting Thomasin off to school and Joe off to day care, I’d arrive at 30 Rock about ten hours before the other writers, with the exception of Bonnie and Terry Turner, a husband-and-wife team from Atlanta who had a daughter Thomasin’s age. Tom had decided to take a break from the show, so when he’d find time, we’d get together to work on our screenplay. I’d write during the day, pick the kids up, make them dinner, tuck them into bed, and, leaving them with a sitter, go back to SNL.