Al Franken, Giant of the Senate
From joke teller to lawmaker
Description
For more than three decades, Al Franken made a living saying things no serious person was supposed to say out loud. He wrote for Saturday Night Live from its first season in 1975, invented a self-help guru named Stuart Smalley who reassured a mirror that he was good enough, and published books with titles that were themselves jokes at the expense of the political right. Then, in 2007, he announced he was running for the United States Senate seat in Minnesota. The reaction, more or less universal, was that this had to be a bit. It was not a bit.
Franken's memoir, published in 2017, tells that story from the inside — how a man whose entire professional identity was built on being funny had to become someone who could not afford to be funny at all. The book is candid about the humiliations of campaigning, the tedium of legislating, and the strange psychic toll of having every joke you ever wrote combed through for material to end you. It is also, characteristically, very funny, which is part of what makes it an unusual document about the actual texture of political life.
What Franken offers is not a triumphant campaign story or a policy manifesto. It is closer to a report from a man who crossed a border most people never cross, kept his sense of humor mostly intact, and came back to describe what the other side looks like — the meetings, the fundraising calls, the colleagues you expected to hate and didn't, the ones you expected to like and couldn't.
The question we’re asking : How does someone whose whole career was built on being funny reinvent himself as a person the public will trust with power?What we’ll see : The improbable crossing from the writers' room to the Senate floor, and the discipline, humiliation, and clear-eyed disappointment that the crossing demanded.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The comedian who wasn't supposed to run
Franken's problem, walking into Minnesota politics, was that he had spent his life producing evidence against himself. Every sketch, every stand-up set, every deliberately provocative line in a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot was now opposition research waiting to happen. A comedian's job is to push a thought as far as it will go for the laugh. A candidate's job is the opposite: to say nothing that can be lifted out of context and played on a loop. Those two jobs, he realized early, could not coexist in the same person, and one of them was going to have to die.
He traces the decision to run back to a genuine political anger rather than a career pivot. He had campaigned for Democrats, hosted a show on the liberal Air America radio network, and watched the Bush years with a frustration that curdled into a sense that he ought to do something more consequential than mock it. Minnesota, his home state and the state of Paul Wellstone — the progressive senator killed in a 2002 plane crash whom Franken openly revered — gave the ambition a specific shape.
02Chapter 2 — Winning by three hundred and twelve votes
The 2008 Senate race against the incumbent Republican Norm Coleman is the engine of the book's middle, and Franken tells it as a nightmare that would not end. Election night produced no winner. The margin was so thin — a few hundred votes out of nearly three million cast — that Minnesota law triggered a mandatory recount, and the recount became a legal war that dragged on for months. Franken did not take his seat until July 2009, more than half a year after the vote.
He writes about the recount with the grim comedy of a man watching his fate get decided one disputed ballot at a time. Lawyers argued over voter intent on ballots where someone had circled a name instead of filling in the oval, or written in a candidate and also marked him. Each contested ballot was projected on a screen and fought over. The eventual certified margin was 312 votes; his memoir dwells on how close the whole thing came to going the other way, and how little separated the senator he became from the punchline he would have been had he lost.
03Chapter 3 — Learning to shut up and legislate
Once seated, Franken made a decision that surprised the reporters waiting to quote him: he went quiet. He turned down interview requests, avoided the Sunday shows, and set out to be a workhorse rather than a show horse. The logic was strategic and slightly bitter. A former comedian who cracked wise on cable news would confirm every doubt about him; a former comedian who mastered the details of Medicare reimbursement and mental-health parity would slowly, grudgingly, earn a different reputation.
He describes the actual labor of legislating with a specificity that most political memoirs skip. Committee hearings, he found, are where the real work happens — the tedious accumulation of expertise, the questioning of witnesses, the amendments nobody notices. He took pride in a provision he pushed into the Dodd-Frank financial law addressing conflicts of interest at credit-rating agencies, the firms that had stamped worthless mortgage bonds as safe before the 2008 crash. It was unglamorous, technical, and exactly the kind of thing that never trends.
04Chapter 4 — What a professional joke-teller sees in Washington
What makes the memoir more than a personal chronicle is that Franken arrived in Washington already trained to notice performance — because performance had been his trade. A comedian spends his life studying how people construct a version of themselves for an audience, where the seams show, when the laugh is earned and when it is manufactured. Turned on the Senate, that instinct sees something uncomfortable: a great deal of what passes for political conviction is a bit, a persona maintained for a camera, indistinguishable in its mechanics from a stage act.
This is the through-line that keeps the book from being a simple redemption arc. Franken suggests that the system does not merely tolerate performance; it rewards it and punishes the alternative. The senator who does the slow committee work is invisible. The senator who delivers the fiery clip goes on television and raises money. Having spent decades manufacturing attention for a living, Franken recognizes the machinery instantly, and he is honest that his own quiet-workhorse strategy was itself a calculated performance of un-performing.
05Conclusion
The man who was told his candidacy had to be a joke served in the Senate from 2009 before resigning in early 2018, and the memoir, written near the height of that career, reads now as a snapshot of an experiment that its own author was still running. Franken had asked whether a person built entirely to be funny could become someone trusted with power, and his answer, delivered with the discipline he had spent years acquiring, was a qualified and hard-won yes — at the price of the very thing that made him.