Al Franken on Politics and Comedy

By Stephen Thompson, The Progressive. Posted October 14, 2005.

Al Franken dabbled in political subject matter as a writer -- and performer -- during two lengthy stints on Saturday Night Live, as well as on his short-lived NBC sitcom, LateLine. He has also worked in film, most notably as co-writer and star of 1995's "Stuart Saves His Family," a spin-off of the Stuart Smalley character he'd created for SNL. But today, Franken's politics overshadow his comedy at virtually every turn. Born in New York City, raised in a suburb of Minneapolis, and educated at Harvard, Franken has become a full-time political figure.

The transformation began in earnest with his 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, followed by his 2003 work, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Now Franken is one of the major players behind Air America Radio, the liberal talk-radio network introduced in March 2004 to counter rightwing domination of the medium. At fifty-four, he spends the bulk of his time touring, preparing, and performing for the sixty-seven-station network, on which he appears as co-host of The Al Franken Show. But his goals are more ambitious still: He recently moved from New York back to Minnesota to prepare for a U.S. Senate run against Norm Coleman in 2008.

Franken recently spoke to The Progressive about his career evolution, the network's past and future, and the political pros and cons of a comedy background.

What are you working on right now?

Really, Air America is my main focus. I'm doing fifteen hours a week on air, and that's pretty all consuming -- you know, preparing for it, doing it. It's really building Air America that I'm focused on, and for me, that almost only means doing a good show. We go on the road and see the affiliates, also, being an ambassador of goodwill.

How is Air America doing? In the beginning, the press was all about how it had gotten off to a rough start, but now it seems to be doing better.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

So in week four, we learned that we bounced a check or two, and that we'd lose our stations in Los Angeles and Chicago, which were our second and third largest markets. It was horrible, and everybody was counting us out, and you can imagine how attractive our network would be to radio stations when it looked like we were going under. So there was really no growth for quite a bit after that, and what we had to do was prove that we were viable.

And we did that by getting good ratings and showing that we're fulfilling a need in a business sense -- that we're bringing in an audience. The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.

Did you have a difficult time attracting talent in the beginning?

Well, we didn't really have a problem attracting talent, because there is no talent to some degree. [Laughs.] The right wing has had a radio apparatus for years and years, so they've had minor leagues -- they've had local rightwing guys who've become national rightwing guys, and who build slowly, and that's how it goes. We haven't had that. It isn't like we have a farm team.

You do have some experienced radio veterans.

Yeah, but you need an experienced radio veteran who is a liberal advocate. And there just hadn't been any radio that did that. And so they weren't trained -- they had developed all these bad habits of being objective and balanced and stuff like that. [Laughs.] It's hard to get that out of a person. I mean, obviously, I value objectivity and actually caring about facts, and we do that on the show. I'm not saying we're objective, but we're advocates. Katherine [Lanpher, co-host of The Al Franken Show] is certainly much more objective than I am, and tries to rein me in and keep me in check, which is good.

Who are your dream Air America contributors? What funny people on the left do you covet?

Well, you know, if Michael Moore did a show ... But why would he? That'd be fun to see him do. Ray Suarez [NPR veteran and NewsHour With Jim Lehrer correspondent] is someone I'd like to see. I would love to have a Washington bureau. I'd like [Clinton Labor Secretary] Robert Reich to do a business show for an hour every day. I think he'd be great.

Do you see Air America as looking to attract more mainstream Democrats, or moving more toward the left? Obviously, further to the left, you've got many people working in community radio.

Yeah, I'm not that left-wing, which is the odd thing about this: My views on most things would jibe with most Americans'. On most issues, most Americans are certainly left of this Administration. Not necessarily left, but more common-sensical. Given a chance, they'd spend less on the military, they wouldn't make more nuclear weapons, they would want to increase environmental regulation rather than reduce it, they would want to spend more on education and health care, they would enforce corporate-responsibility laws and make corporations pay their taxes, all those kinds of things. Crazy talk. [Laughs.]

Stephen Thompson is a writer and editor based in Madison, Wisconsin.

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