Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  That’s when I started going to Al-Anon, a twelve-step program for family members and friends of alcoholics based on the principles of AA. Like AA, Al-Anon isn’t for everybody. But once I started, it didn’t take long for me to realize a few important things.

  For one thing, I finally realized that Franni wasn’t the only addict in my life. My best friend since high school and writing partner for nearly twenty years was addicted—to alcohol, to cocaine, to pretty much anything that came his way.

  But I also realized something about myself: that my reaction to Franni’s and Tom’s addictive behavior had made me a much less pleasant person to be around.

  As in AA, the fourth step in Al-Anon is to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. The fifth step is to admit to (your concept of) God, to yourself, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.

  That’s to “another human being,” and not to everyone who reads this book. But I will say that I had developed a tendency to lose my temper, be judgmental, and roll my eyes when I thought someone said something stupid. In other words, at times I could be a bit of a jerk.USS

  I also discovered how much I could learn from listening to other people’s stories—even people who at first blush didn’t seem like the kind of people you could learn much of anything from.

  Thus the birth of Stuart Smalley, the healing nurturer and member of several twelve-step programs who hosted “Daily Affirmations” on SNL. Stuart became my most popular character on the show.

  Guess who hated Stuart? Tom. We still wrote together sometimes, but he was becoming less and less of a presence on the show. One late Friday night, Tom came into the office and strolled past the big rewrite table, where Jim Downey and I and a couple other writers were trying to come up with a cold opening for the next night’s show. “What are you working on?” asked Tom.

  Downey said, “Saturday Night Live.”

  By 1991, Tom and I were still Franken and Davis, at least in theory. But while Franni was doing great in recovery, Tom was screwing up and in big trouble. So I organized an intervention.

  In an intervention, you usually present the alcoholic/addict with some consequences if he/she refuses to go for treatment. It was hard to do—Tom had been my best friend since high school, I had named my daughter after him, and despite the tension between us, I still thought he was the funniest guy I knew (certainly, in my mind, the funnier half of Franken and Davis). But I told him during the intervention that if he didn’t go to rehab, we’d no longer be a team. It didn’t work.

  It was a sad day. It was the end of our partnership and, at least for a few years, our friendship. And as is the case so often with addiction, things got weird. After the intervention, Tom found a guy who threatened to sue me if I didn’t split the income I’d made from projects I’d done without him. I tried to reason with Tom, but he refused even to speak with me.

  But Tom and I had forgotten that, well before the intervention, we had agreed to be the Alumni of the Year for Blake. For a host of reasons, it was something we couldn’t not do.

  So Tom and I found ourselves at our old campus, arguing in the wings of the auditorium about the threatened lawsuit, as Mr. Fecht explained to the K–6th graders, “Al and Tom were two boys who went to school here. And they had a dream. That dream was to be on TV. And they worked very, very hard, and the dream came true!”

  Addiction can take an unimaginable toll on the people who love addicts. And that’s true even when the addicts in question find recovery. When Franni came back from rehab, things were still difficult. It turns out that early recovery can be hard on everyone. That experience became the basis for the 1994 movie When a Man Loves a Woman, which I wrote with my friend (and Oscar winner) Ron Bass. The movie, which starred Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan, has a happy and, I like to think, moving ending.

  And of course, Franni and I had a happy ending, too. We’re still married. We never argue about anything ever. And the Higher Power removed all of my character defects, making me the most well-adjusted senator in the history of the body.

  Oh, and the movie made money for the studio. Ron and I each got a fruit basket after the opening weekend.

  The next summer, I shot a Stuart Smalley movie I had written and was starring in, with Harold Ramis directing. Harold, who died in 2014, had been a friend since 1974, and was one of the comedy giants of our generation.

  Stuart Saves His Family, however, was by far Harold’s least successful film, dying a terrible death at the box office. No fruit basket.

  In the end, Tom never actually sued me. We reconciled a few years later and he asked me to be the best man at his wedding. We remained extremely close, reuniting for special performances and for frequent appearances on my radio show and sharing our devotion to the Grateful Dead and the inevitable disappointments from our beloved Minnesota Vikings.

  In 2009, he was diagnosed with cancer, and given six months to a year. He lived three years with courage, grace, and humor—a gift to me and all who knew and loved him.

  I visited Tom a few days before he died at the house we once shared in upstate New York. Dan Aykroyd and his wife, Donna, came that day as well, and we laughed about how Tom had lain behind the counter during the Julia Child sketch, controlling the pressure on the spurting blood by working an insecticide sprayer that sent the dark red liquid through plastic tubing that ran up Danny’s leg and through his sleeve, ending at his wrist. It was a special effect, which, technically, is supposed to be performed by a union guy on the crew. But the crew loved Tom, and besides, he knew the bit, and he and Danny worked it to perfection live on air.

  Tom’s humor was always sardonic. As you can imagine, it was even more sardonic that day. He was ready to go. The last few months hadn’t been a lot of fun, but he told me he did enjoy crushing up the Dilaudid pills he’d been prescribed and snorting them.

  I told Tom that the way he was making his exit was an inspiration to me. He said, “I hope you go a little faster.”

  When Tom died, I called his mom, Jean, who recalled how much she loved hearing us laugh from their basement.

  A tremendous outpouring of love and affection for Tom flowed in from all over the country. It was wonderful to read people’s memories of their favorite lines or sketches. Clearly, Tom had touched people’s lives, or at least made them laugh.

  I spoke on the Senate floor about Tom a couple days later. I’m a crier, so I practiced the speech aloud about forty times so I could make it through. I held it together until “Rest in peace.”

  The next day, I was sitting in a Judiciary Committee hearing when a staffer slipped me a note: “Leader Reid is on the phone for you.” It was unusual for the majority leader to call me in the middle of a hearing. I got up and went to the anteroom and picked up the phone.

  “Harry?”

  “Al, I read your eulogy to your friend. He was quite a guy.”

  “Yes, sir. He was.”

  “I loved this part. ‘The Dark Side of Death.’”

  I smiled. Then Harry read a passage from a piece Tom had written about dying: “In the foreseeable future, I will be a dead person. I want to remind you that dead people are people too. There are good dead people and bad dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people. Dead people have fought in every war.”

  Then Harry said, “It’s perfect.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Perfect.”

  Chapter 5

  Saturday Night Live (The Part Where I Leave)

  Over the fifteen years I spent at SNL, I worked on hundreds of sketches, many of them just big, dumb, silly stuff, like Belushi as Elizabeth Taylor choking on a chicken bone. But the body of work I’m proudest of is the political satire the show produced. It’s important to emphasize that that work reflects the contributions of many writers and cast members. But more than anyone else, the credit for the sustained quality of SNL’s political satire belongs to Jim Downey, the show’s longtime head writer, producer, and occasional performer.*

&nbs
p; Jim had a hand in virtually every SNL debate sketch during the nearly thirty-five seasons he spent at the show, including the genius “Strategery/Lockbox” debate he wrote between George W. Bush and Al Gore, played brilliantly by Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond. (Bush never said “strategery” until Jim put it in Will’s mouth.)

  There’s a good argument to be made that Jim’s 2000 debate sketch was the most important piece of writing in that election cycle. Americans knew that Bush had trouble with the English language—Bush made fun of that himself. But Jim caught a certain superciliousness with Darrell’s Gore that Americans hadn’t quite put their finger on. Jim and Darrell nailed it so specifically that anyone who watched the sketch couldn’t help but associate the real Gore with the fake Gore’s repeated sighs and constant invoking of the Social Security “lockbox.” With that election decided by some five hundred votes in Florida (and a 5–4 Supreme Court decision), it’s easy to argue that Jim Downey changed the course of history, I would say tragically. I think Gore would have been a great president, may well have prevented 9/11, and would not have sent us to war in Iraq based on manufactured evidence. And he’d have addressed climate change, which to me is the greatest existential threat facing mankind.

  So, thanks, Jim.

  During the George H. W. Bush administration, Jim and I wrote any number of cold openings, knowing that Dana Carvey’s “Nah gah dah”* Bush could get laughs pretty much at will. Jim and I would craft a piece that had a progression: “This vial of crack was found in Lafayette Park just across the street from the White House. This hypodermic needle was found on the White House lawn. And this bag of cocaine was found right here in the Oval Office just two feet from this desk! It’s bad! It’s bad!! It’s gettin’ baaad!!!” Dana could get so many laughs along the way just with his hands that the audience would sometimes lose the through line, and between dress rehearsal and air Jim and I would actually have to tell him not to get so many laughs. Dana, of course, to his enormous credit, understood and delivered every time.

  Jim is an open-minded political conservative. I like to think I’m an open-minded liberal. We, like Lorne and everyone else on the show, felt it wasn’t our job on SNL to have a political bias and advocate for one side or the other. That was fine for a show like Murphy Brown, a sitcom created by one person, Diane English, and starring Candice Bergen as a feminist TV journalist. SNL was a comedy-variety show, with many writers and performers, each with distinct voices and views. Sure, the preponderance of the cast and staff had your garden-variety Hollywood liberal views, but we tried to do well-observed political satire that made the audience laugh and had the virtue of not being stupid. Jim’s rule was to reward viewers for knowing stuff about politics without punishing them for not.

  So SNL wasn’t the place to push my own personal political agenda. I saved that for my son’s Little League practices. At the show, I was part of a team of dozens of writers and performers, and for our team, funny was the only thing that mattered.

  I did, however, start taking advantage of more and more opportunities to do political satire outside the show, where I could be a little more pointed about making fun of people who really deserved it.

  In the summer of 1992, I anchored a series of specials on Comedy Central covering every night of both the Democratic National Convention in New York City and the Republican National Convention in Houston. We called the show Indecision ’92.

  We broadcast out of a small studio in lower Manhattan. Our pledge was that viewers of our coverage wouldn’t miss anything that happened. To accomplish this, I sat at an anchor desk with a screen behind me carrying the live “feed” from the convention floor that the networks shared. Writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr. sat nearby in a Barcalounger watching four TVs tuned to the coverage on ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS.

  That way, if anything important and/or interesting happened, we could bring it to you within ten seconds. For instance, if Dan Rather said, “If a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun,” Roy would let us know right away.

  Modern political conventions tend to be tightly scripted, which is why the broadcast networks devoted only two hours a night to covering them. We did four hours a night, giving us plenty of time for commentary and comedy from a slate of special guests designed for political junkies—Norm Ornstein, Christopher Hitchens, Calvin Trillin, Ben Stein, Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., and Roger Ailes. Yes, Roger Ailes, who actually was very funny and who, as far as I know, did not sexually harass anyone during the two hours he was with us. Between the two conventions, my favorite letter came from a viewer who wrote, “The guy you had play Norm Ornstein was perfect.”

  During the first night of the Republican National Convention in Houston, Ben Stein and I did commentary live during Pat Buchanan’s “religious war” speech, the one that Molly Ivins said “probably sounded better in the original German.” Watching the speech, I made the comment that Buchanan’s angry tone would hurt the Bush campaign. And, of course, it did—which traditional pundits wouldn’t pick up on for weeks. In their 1992 year-in-review, Rolling Stone said, “It was disorienting to watch a comedy broadcast that almost incidentally told more truth and offered more insight than most networks and newspapers and at the same time was so much more comfortable to watch.”

  Today, of course, the idea of “comedy that tells the truth in a way that serious political analysis misses” isn’t strange. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert became not just successful comedians, but respected political figures, because night after night, year after year, they offered more truth and insight than most real TV news.

  But they didn’t invent meaningful political satire. They just brought it to a level of unprecedented popularity and influence. Before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, there was Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. And before Politically Incorrect, there was Indecision ’92. And before that there was something Jonathan Swift wrote about the Potato Famine.

  After the eight nights of coverage of the conventions, we added a ninth show on election night 1992. The evening began with a balloon drop as we called the election for Bill Clinton, several hours before the networks did—based on exit poll data we had obtained from sources inside one of the networks.*

  By disregarding the notorious unreliability of exit polling, Comedy Central became the first source to break the news that Bill Clinton had been elected the forty-second president of the United States. And I’m afraid that maybe I was just a little too visibly happy about it.

  You see, in 1994, I was vying for a job I had wanted for years at SNL: anchoring “Weekend Update.” But because I’d been wearing my bleeding liberal heart on my sleeve more and more, it was next to impossible for me to be an unbiased voice on the show’s signature segment commenting on the week’s news.

  That year, I headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which Beltway nerds nerdily refer to as the “Nerd Prom” because it allows the Washington elite to mingle with the significantly more attractive Hollywood elite. Shortly after my performance, I was in Lorne’s office with Steve Martin and Lorne. “Al, I saw that White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Steve said, grinning. “You were great! That’s what you should do!”

  When Lorne didn’t say, “Well, Steve, that’s exactly what Al’s going to be doing! As the new anchor of ‘Weekend Update’!” I kind of knew where things were headed. Lorne and Don Ohlmeyer, then the head of NBC, went with Norm MacDonald, who in retrospect was a much better choice.

  Losing out on “Update” was a big part of the reason I decided it was time to move on after fifteen seasons at SNL. It was a difficult decision. I loved the show. Lorne had created a safe haven for writers and performers, and there was nothing quite like writing something on a Tuesday night and seeing it kill on Saturday. But as we learn in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for all things. A time to kill. A time to heal. A time to leave the show. A time to stay much too long at the show.

  After the Correspondents’ Dinner, the whip-smart Leslie Schnur, who had edit
ed the Stuart Smalley book that eventually turned into the Stuart Smalley movie, suggested I try my hand at a political book. The title came to me in a flash: Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.

  The title, you see, was an ironic comment on the loss of civility in our public discourse. Limbaugh, with an audience of twenty million listeners a week, had been the bombastic cheerleader for the Gingrich Revolution, which culminated in the 1994 midterm elections when Republicans took the majority in the House for the first time in forty years.

  The distinctly antigovernment Limbaugh/Gingrich agenda swept in a significant number of radical Republicans and with them a partisan enmity that has just grown even worse over the past two decades. In addition to the nastiness, there seemed to be a new willingness to lie about basic facts. According to Limbaugh, there is no conclusive proof that nicotine is addictive, and there are more American Indians alive today than when Columbus landed in 1492, and if all the polar ice caps melted, sea level would not rise. (Rush explained that if an ice cube melts in a glass of water, the water level remains the same. Unfortunately, Greenland is a landmass, not an ice cube.)

  Leaving SNL seemed like a good opportunity to use my comedic chops to influence the national political conversation instead of using my political knowledge to inform the comedy on the show. In RLIABFIAOO, I not only focused on Limbaugh and Gingrich, but also took on the whole cast of characters from the whack-job right: from elected officials to conservative activists to columnists and TV pundits. When I finished the book, I had the publisher send Rush a copy with a note saying, “Al thinks it would help sales if you mentioned the book on the show.” Well, one thing Rush Limbaugh isn’t is an idiot. (He was, however, very fat.) So he kept his mouth shut. Nevertheless, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for twenty-three weeks.