The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website July 3, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: Sen. Al Franken writes about “The Funny” like it’s a dangerous disease his political career has been perennially at risk of falling victim to.
Launching his first campaign 10 years ago, the Minnesota Democrat needed to convince party leaders, donors and activists that his career as a comedian was not a fatal liability. After he won, he needed to convince fellow senators that he was not the caricature they remembered from “Saturday Night Live.”
Pollsters, consultants and D.C. fixers urged him to act as serious as possible to disabuse such notions.
Franken confesses in his new book that he struggled to keep “The Funny” in a box much more than he’s ever let on publicly. He recounts in vivid detail an inner-dialogue during a 2009 hearing of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee about a proposed Employee Non-Discrimination Act. The room was packed with LGBT advocates, but no Republican senators had shown up.
As others made opening statements, a joke occurred to the then-freshman: “Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, if, when I was called on, I said, ‘I think it’s a shame that none of the gay members of the committee showed up today’? I knew, of course, that telling the joke was a really bad idea. It would undermine everything I had been working toward: to be seen as a workhorse and not a showhorse, and yada yada. The ‘yada yada’ came from the Devil as he popped up on my right shoulder. ‘C’mon!!!’ the Devil yelled. ‘Tell the joke! It’ll kill!!!’
“‘Now, Al,’ the Angel appearing on my left shoulder said calmly, if a bit sanctimoniously, ‘you worked way too hard for far too long to do this, and you know it.’ ‘It’ll kill!!!’ the Devil screamed, hopping up and down. ‘It’ll get a HUGE laugh!!!’ … The Devil was positively vibrating with excitement. … ‘Screw the press!!!’”
Franken devotes seven pages to the protracted debate between the angel and the devil in his head:
“The other side will accuse you of saying that all the Republicans on the HELP Committee are gay,” the angel tells him.
“It’s a joke!!!” the devil snarls. “Everyone will know it’s a joke!”
“Of course they will, Al. But you know how this works,” warns the angel. “They will all pretend they’re deeply offended.”
“The cacophony coming from my left and right trapeziuses was making it hard for me to pay attention. And, frankly, both the Angel and the Devil were making valid points,” the senator recalls. “I started experiencing a kind of vertigo. You know that feeling you get when you’re on the balcony of a very tall building and start to panic because you realize you could just throw yourself off?”
Franken decided to not make the joke: “As I read my opening statement, I thought of my actual staff up in our office blithely watching their boss on TV with no inkling of the anguished psychodrama I had endured and how, for the moment, anyway, my reputation, and their jobs, were secure.”
The fact that Franken includes this anecdote midway through “Giant of the Senate,” in chapter 28 of 47, demonstrates that he’s gotten over many of his earlier trepidations. He made a deal with himself: “From that day forward, it was okay for me to be mildly funny. In spots.”
View the post here.