Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  One of the first was with Chris Dodd, who had represented Connecticut in the Senate since 1981 and been a leader within the Democratic Party since the age of the real giants of the Senate, the Ted Kennedy and Mike Mansfield types. And nine-foot-tall Ed Muskie.

  Chris was running a little late for our meeting, so I cooled my heels in his outer office. Looking around, I noticed that the entire room was jam-packed with awards he’d received during his long and distinguished career. Plaques hung on every inch of wall space. Wooden plaques, acrylic plaques, plaques of slate and granite. And the shelves! Every possible surface was covered with awards. Crystal awards. Glass awards. Stainless steel awards. Lucite awards of all shapes and sizes. Cubes, stars, eagles! I was blown away. And a little depressed. “Oh my God,” I thought. “I will never get this many awards. I’d have to be here for thirty years! How old will I be then? Eighty? No, older! Ugh.” It was a stupid emotional hole to fall in, but I fell in it nevertheless.

  Chris arrived, greeted me brightly, and escorted me to his office—past more and more shelves of awards. After we sat down in his office, I tried to listen to his advice, but the awards on his wall and bookshelves started to close in and mock me.

  “How was the meeting?” Drew asked when I returned.

  “Aw, man,” I said, still in a funk. “He has so many awards.”

  Drew tried to reassure me. “Don’t worry about that. You’ll get plenty of awards.”

  I thought he was just trying to cheer me up, but it turns out he was right. Apparently, when you’re a senator, people just throw awards at you on a regular basis.

  Sometimes it’s a trade association or a well-meaning public interest group giving you an award just for voting their way on something. Sometimes an organization will give you one of their big awards in the hope that you’ll agree to speak at their annual dinner so they can get a lot more people to come. I used to get a big sack of cash for a speech like that. Now I get a Lucite plaque.

  In any event, I quickly began to amass quite a collection of awards in my own office, a collection that has continued to grow over the years. I will say that some of them do mean a lot to me, like the awards I’ve won from Consumer Watchdog for my leadership on consumer rights, or from the Humane Society after my service dogs bill, or from the National Law Center on Homelessness for my work on the Violence Against Women Act.

  Sometimes, however, an organization will go out of its way to make sure I understand that an award it’s giving me means very little. I was very excited when I found out that the Minnesota Farm Bureau was presenting me with their Friend of Farm Bureau Award. The Farm Bureau is a pretty conservative organization, almost always endorsing the Republican in political campaigns, as they did Norm Coleman in 2008. The Farmers Union, the progressive farm organization, had endorsed me.

  One out of five jobs in Minnesota is tied to agriculture. We’re the number one producer of turkeys. Number two in pork. The Green Giant is from Le Sueur, Minnesota. You’ve probably heard of General Mills—Betty Crocker is a Minnesota native. And so is the Pillsbury Doughboy, who served our nation so deliciously in World War I.

  So even though I wasn’t on the Agriculture Committee, it was essential that I learn about farming, something I started during the campaign by visiting farms all around the state. I learned quickly that farmers aren’t just farmers. They’re mechanics, veterinarians, marketers, economists, and meteorologists.

  In the Senate, I had to master the very arcane world of ag policy. And even though I still had some disagreements with the Farm Bureau on things like the estate tax and clean water regulation, I fought for the interests of all our farmers.

  So when Kevin Paap, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau and a farmer with a six-hundred-acre corn and soybean operation near Mankato, came to my office to present me with my first Friend of Farm Bureau plaque, I was thrilled. “Kevin,” I said, “this really means a lot to me. I really appreciate it. It’s a tremendous honor.”

  He could tell that I meant it. “Oh,” he said, matter-of-factly, “this is only about how you voted.” What he was really saying was: Don’t get us wrong—we still don’t like you.

  I remind Kevin about that conversation every chance I get, and we laugh about it. We’ve become pretty good friends. In October 2012, Kevin invited me out to his farm to harvest the last five acres of his corn crop. Kevin dubbed those last five acres the “Franken Five.”

  Harvesting the corn was incredibly easy because Kevin uses GPS technology to plant and harvest. The combine shoots a golden arc of grain into a truck that runs alongside, and when you reach the end, you just turn the thing around, line it up, and go. It took all of about a half hour.

  On the way to the grain elevator, Kevin worried aloud that my corn might be a little dry since it was harvested so late and that he’d get less for it. I had this horrible thought that the “Franken Five” might become synonymous with the worst five acres on your farm. “I pulled one over on that guy—sold him my Franken Five! Hahaha!” Stuff like that. Fortunately, my corn had the perfect moisture content. That’s just the kind of senator I am.

  The Farm Bureau still doesn’t support me, and a lot of its conservative members aren’t big fans of mine. But I’ve won a few of them over in two important ways. First, I do my homework and have delivered on the issues where we agree. Second, I have a joke I tell every time I speak to an ag audience.

  It goes like this. “You know,” I say, “I grew up in St. Louis Park. I was a suburban kid. I knew nothing about agriculture growing up. In fact, when I was eight years old, if you’d asked me where food comes from, what do you think I would have said?”

  And the audience always shouts, “The grocery store!”

  And I say, “No. I would have said, ‘A farm!’ Because I wasn’t a total idiot.” Big laugh, every time. Well, until recently. Every farmer in Minnesota has heard it by now.

  Speaking of my comedic genius, in December 2015 the Writers Guild of America East announced that I would receive its prestigious Evelyn F. Burkey Award, which recognizes a person or organization “whose contributions have brought honor and dignity to writers.” Previous recipients of the award had included Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Joan Didion—and now me, the distinguished author of “Porn-O-Rama.”

  I decided to point out in my acceptance speech that it didn’t say the recipient of the Evelyn F. Burkey Award had always “brought honor and dignity to writers.” Just on balance.

  Today, there are too many awards to fit in my office. But when I told my staff I was writing this chapter, they warned me: People might stop giving them to you.

  “Well, first of all,” I told them, “no, they won’t. People understand jokes. Take it from me, an Evelyn F. Burkey Award–winning writer.”

  They rolled their eyes.

  “Second of all, if they do stop giving me awards, that’s really kind of fine. We’ve run out of space anyway. But they won’t.”

  To inquire about giving Sen. Franken an award, please contact Brynna Schmidt at (202) 224-5671.

  Chapter 43

  We Build a DeHumorizer™

  As I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, senators don’t get a lot of opportunities to be funny in public. Remember when Jeff Blodgett, Wellstone’s campaign manager, told me to try writing a five-minute speech with no jokes in it, and I thought he was crazy? Well, it turns out that you really can’t tell a joke in a speech on the Senate floor. Why? Because no one is there. The Senate chamber is usually empty except for the speaker, a few staffers, and the presiding officer, who’s reading press clippings instead of listening to you. But viewers at home don’t know that: C-SPAN is on a tight single of you, the speaking senator. To the viewer, it looks like you could be addressing a packed house. But if you were stupid enough to tell a joke, viewers would hear no reaction. Nothing. Which means your joke died a terrible death.

  Still, like in any profession, humor can be a way to create connections that could blossom into friendships. Or at least
a little slack-cutting. Plus, it can help keep everybody sane at especially stressful moments. Which is true even when the people you work with don’t necessarily have finely honed comedic sensibilities themselves.

  Here’s my best example of all of those things happening at once.

  One day in 2015, right after the Iran nuclear agreement was announced, there was a classified briefing in a secure room with about eighty senators.

  Republicans were eager to attack the deal and condemn the president for agreeing to it. Plus, we were talking about issues of war and peace, life and death. So it was kind of a tense meeting, and it got even more tense as we heard impressive presentations from Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and our lead CIA expert on Iran, whom I will call “Mr. Quimby.”

  The Senate majority leader, whom I will call “Mitch,” was in charge of the meeting, and you could tell he was unhappy at how persuasive the administration’s representatives had been. When it came time for questions, both Republicans and Democrats asked some difficult ones, but I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans (all of whom ended up voting against the agreement) were particularly on edge, and some of their questions were downright hostile. The briefers, for their part, handled these tough questions extremely well. Which only seemed to make the Republicans crankier.

  Eventually, it was my turn. I wanted to ask about something that Iran’s Supreme Leader had said about the deal. But I was also sensing that the tension in the room was reaching a boiling point. So when “Mitch” called on me, I decided to at least attempt to lighten things up just a little bit.

  “Yes,” I said, “I have a question about the Supreme Leader. Who I like to call the Supreme Being.”

  Now, please understand, I consider this barely a joke. But for whatever reason, probably the high degree of tension in the room, it got an enormous laugh. Even Mitch McConnell laughed out loud! Try to imagine what that looks and sounds like! You can’t!

  “Mr. Quimby” explained why he thought the Supreme Leader—“or Supreme Being, if you will” (“Mr. Quimby” enjoyed the joke, too)—had said what he said. And we moved on.

  But the weird thing was, the joke—again, as slight as it was—did the trick. The tension drained out of the room. Leaving the briefing later, I was still a little puzzled. Frankly, my jokes are often underappreciated in the Senate. But this one, if anything, was overappreciated.

  On the subway back to my office, a Republican senator who hardly ever votes with me asked, “Could I use that joke in my state?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Be my guest.”

  “Why is it funny?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s because ‘Supreme Leader’ is such a weird term to us that he might as well be calling himself ‘Supreme Being.’”

  My colleague laughed again and nodded. Got it.

  For the rest of the day, senators kept coming up to me in the halls and in hearings.

  “Great joke!”

  “Supreme Being!”

  “That was hilarious!”

  I was kind of astonished.

  That afternoon, I showed up on the floor for a couple of votes and found a group of colleagues happily recalling the joke. And that’s when I spotted Chuck Schumer making a beeline for me, grinning from ear to ear.

  “I told the president your joke!” he exclaimed, his eyes sparkling with delight. “Supreme One!”

  Huh? “Supreme Being,” I said.

  Chuck thought for a second. “Yes! Supreme Being!” A beat, then Chuck, still grinning, admitted, “I said ‘Supreme One.’”

  “So you told the president that the Supreme Leader might as well be called the ‘Supreme One.’”

  “Yes,” Chuck affirmed, still beaming.

  “Did he laugh?”

  “No.”

  “And you told him it was my joke?”

  Chuck nodded, still grinning. “Yes.”

  I love Chuck Schumer. He’s one of the smartest, most strategic, most passionate Democrats in Washington, which is why he’s the leader of our caucus in the Senate—I call him the Jewish LBJ. But he’s also kind of a character. Running around with his archaic flip phone, barging into conversations, talking too loud, screwing up jokes—no matter what kind of relatives you have, Chuck will remind you of one of them. In fact, my daughter, Thomasin, likes to say that the mere fact that he exists, let alone serves in the United States Senate, is hilarious.

  I get asked a lot, “Is it hard not to be funny?” (I prefer this question to “Why aren’t you funny anymore?”)

  And the truth is… kind of, yeah. I can’t help it. Even after all this, my instinct is still to at least try and go for the joke. Even when it’s probably a really bad idea.

  For example, when I take pictures with families, I often playfully put two kids in headlocks and squeeze their heads together. It always gets a laugh. I did it once to the two young sons of Chris Murphy, a rising Democratic star who represents Connecticut in the Senate and serves as a voice of conscience on both gun violence and foreign policy.

  Watching me squeeze his boys’ heads together, Chris said, “That’s the kind of thing that would bring joy to thousands of families, until one day it ends your career.”

  I still do it, by the way.

  But in general, rather than trusting my ability to sort out the funny things that would bring joy to thousands of families from the funny things that might end my career, I’ve come up with a strategy to avoid falling prey to the Republicans’ DeHumorizer™: I built one of my own. It’s called my staff.

  Every member of my staff is empowered to be the DeHumorizer™ at any given moment. Any staffer driving me, for instance, is encouraged to respond to things I say with, “Okay, that’s for inside the car.” Or the oft-used, “Fine. Get it out of your system.”

  Sometimes there’s a group decision, usually involving my chief of staff and our communications team. The chief has final say, though sometimes I make an appeal to Franni. I don’t know why. She always sides with the staff.

  Notes have been a running source of disagreement. During my second week in office I wrote my first note to a constituent. Ruth Anderson of Marshall, Minnesota, was born on July 24, 1899, was about to celebrate her 110th birthday.

  I sat down at my desk and wrote on my official stationery:

  Dear Ruth,

  You have a bright future.

  Sincerely,

  Al Franken

  I handed the note to Drew.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s a joke,” I said.

  “You know you can’t send this, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know, I thought maybe she’d get a kick out of it.” Drew pointed out that her family might not “get a kick out of it.”

  Senators write a lot of notes. To constituents, to people you’ve had meetings with, to colleagues. Drew nixed this birthday note to John McCain:

  Dear John,

  Hope you have a great year. Of course, any year would be better than the five you spent in the Hanoi Hilton.

  Sincerely,

  Al

  The thing about having Drew as a DeHumorizer™ was that it freed me to write anything I wanted. If Drew rejected it, I’d just redo it. Like the birthday note I wrote for Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who received the Medal of Honor after losing his arm to a grenade in World War II:

  Dear Danny,

  I hope when I’m your age, I’m just like you—healthy, with two good arms. Oh, wait!

  Sincerely,

  Al

  Danny had a great sense of humor, and I believed that both he and McCain would have appreciated getting something a little different. But Drew was more concerned about my colleagues’ staffs getting their noses out of joint.

  So I’d just write the first thing that came to mind, and if the note got through Drew, I’d assume it was fine.

  One day on the floor Kay Bailey Hutchison from Texas came up
to me with a big grin on her face. “I just loved your birthday note! We’ve hung it up in our office! It’s sooo funny.” I had no clue what I had written. My scheduler, Tara, pulled up the copy she’d made.

  Dear Kay,

  Happy birthday!

  Well, it’s been quite a year! Together, we’ve passed health care reform, Wall St. re—wait! I thought I was sending Kay Hagan my birthday wishes.

  Anyway, happy birthday!

  All the best,

  Al

  Kay Hagan, of course, was a Democrat who had worked with me to pass health care and Wall St. reform. Thus the joke which Kay Bailey Hutchison had so vastly overappreciated.

  Despite what I’ve learned about how tough a room the Senate chamber can be, I have sometimes tried to slip in The Funny during speeches. Once, while working on a speech about the verification regime in the New START nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia, I came up with this: “A wise man once said, ‘Trust but verify.’ That man was quoting Ronald Reagan.”

  Drew said no. “Al, people love Ronald Reagan.”

  “Oh, c’mon!” I said. “It’s a joke!”*

  In April 2011, Arizona Republican Jon Kyl spoke on the floor of the Senate, saying that abortion services were “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” Actually, abortion services make up approximately 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

  When Kyl got called out, his spokesman issued this remarkable defense: “His remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”

  I told Drew I wanted to go to the floor and introduce a Senate resolution saying, “Any statement made on the floor of the Senate that is presented as factual must be intended to be factual.”