“I may body-slam you.”

Senator Al Franken is joking. Spotting a Guardian reporter, he thinks of the former Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte’s body slam of the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs, and cannot resist the quip. Having surgically removed his funny bone and gone serious, Franken is allowing himself to be funny again.

On a recent visit to South St Paul Farmers’ Market in his home state of Minnesota, the comedian-turned-politician sports a purple Vikings NFL hat and starts by buying green beans for $3 and zucchini for $2, digging into his wallet to pay 27-year-old Ming Yang. As he moves to the next vegetable stall, she admits she is unaware of his previous career. “I only know what he’s done as a politician,” she says.

Also among the rain-soaked gathering is Lisa Kleven, 51, wearing a “Franken 2020” T-shirt she had made that morning. Yes, she explains, she would like him to run for president: “I’m so fed up listening to bad, ugly politics from Donald Trump and I think Al has been doing a good job holding people to account in the Senate. There was talk of people worrying that he was a comedian, but he’s a good guy with honesty and integrity.”



In many ways, Franken embodies the spirit of a time in which comedy is political and politics are comical. He got his break as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in 1975 when Gerald Ford was president. He left in 1980, then had a second spell from 1985 to 1995, and was twice a guest performer at the White House correspondents’ dinner. SNL’s lampooning of politicians such as George W Bush and Sarah Palin has long struck a nerve, but it has truly become part of the national conversation in the current era, for example with Alec Baldwin’s pastiche of Trump and Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer.

When Franken, talk radio host and author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, ran for US Senate in 2008, Republicans inevitably stripped his jokes of context and tried to weaponise them. But Franken showed his run was no stunt.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, recalls: “He was really smart. He really got to know the state, he showed up, he built a real campaign organisation. He showed he was committed and willing to learn and follow direction. He became a really infuriating guy. Let’s say I interview a thousand politicians in a year: he was easily the most boring.”

Boring worked. The Democrat won by 312 votes after a legal battle that dragged on for eight months.

Hillary Clinton speaks with Al Franken at Democratic National Convention in Boston on 29 July 2004. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters

And boring continued. As he chronicles in his book Giant of the Senate, described by the Washington Post’s James Hohmann as “the most candid memoir I can recall by a sitting senator”, Franken reckoned he had to prove himself as “a workhorse and not a show horse”. He seldom spoke to reporters. He recalls committee hearings where his “devil” was sitting on shoulder, urging him to tell a risque joke, and his “angel” was on the other, pleading with him not to. The angel usually won.

But re-elected with room to spare in 2014, Franken has felt able to cut loose somewhat and juggle the roles of well briefed straight man – his sharp questions have rattled Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions – with a cautious return to court jester.

The senator who tours the farmers’ market, then sits at the Black Sheep Coffee Cafe for an interview, is affable, down to earth and bursts out laughing as readily as breathing. He has evidently left what he calls the DeHumorizer – an imaginary $15m machine built with Israeli technology – behind in Washington.

There are a lot of people who feel there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans: they’re all self-serving Al Franken

Well, almost. “There are certain jokes that I don’t tell,” he says. “There always will be. The culture of comedy is there’s just a category of jokes, what is the worst thing you can say? That is literally like a large segment [laughs] of comedy from comedians and that should not be in your quiver as a senator. ‘I’m now going to say the worst thing I can say.’”

Some of the most trenchant skewering of Trump has come from SNL and the satirists Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah. Some critics have blamed them for deepening divisions: the Atlantic suggested that “sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug”, while the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Bee embodied “the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism”.

Franken recalls of his SNL days: “When I was writing the satire on the show, we really didn’t think that we had a political point of view to project. It’s almost impossible with Trump not to do, ‘This guy is something that we’ve never seen before.’ He’s a guy who will lie, a guy who is completely undisciplined, a guy who won’t know anything, who doesn’t have the discipline or interest to learn public policy. I think laughter is good. There’s tremendous anxiety among people who are like-minded.”



He recently made the haunting observation that he has never seen Trump laugh and rejects the suggestion that the president – host of The Apprentice, fleeting wrestler, carnival barker – and himself are two sides of the same showbiz coin. “I understand there’s a thread of that but I couldn’t think of someone as more different than me and also kind of, a little bit, resent the idea that he’s an entertainer because yeah, reality television is a form of entertainment, but so is a human cannonball. Rodeo clown is in entertainment. A Barbra Streisand impersonator is in entertainment.”

Al Franken and comedian Sarah Silverman speak during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on 25 July 2016. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

‘To pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you’ve got to have the boots’

Franken indicates in his book why comedy alone was not enough and why he felt compelled to fight for the Democratic party. Like the film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen, the journalist and author Thomas Friedman and the political scholar Norm Ornstein, he grew up in the Jewish community in St Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His generation enjoyed the postwar expansion of the middle class, strong schools and a chance to go to university: “I felt like I could do anything.”



For his wife, it was harder. Her father, a second world war veteran, died in a car accident when she was 18 months old. Her mother was 29 and widowed with five children. They lived off social security but all four girls in the family went into higher education with the help of grants and scholarships. Franken’s brother-in-law joined the coast guard.

Just then, a patron of the cafe interrupts: “I just want to say thank you, Mr Franken. God bless you.” The senator takes the compliment politely and carries on.

“They say you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. All Americans believe that. First, you’ve got to have the boots. My wife’s family got the boots and they all became productive middle-class people who obviously did better than where they started. That’s why I’m a Democrat.”

But did this message get lost in the last election? “Oh yeah, it definitely got lost, and I think that we got to get back to that,” says Franken, who supported Hillary Clinton but at this moment sounds more like Bernie Sanders. “Many of the Trump voters, I think, are doing OK, but they see a lot of people not doing OK. They feel like the system is rigged and I agree with them, the system is rigged. I think we have different interpretations of how it’s rigged, but they’re angry at elites, and elites include Democrats and Republicans.

“I think there are a lot of people who just feel there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans: they’re all self-serving, and they responded to Trump saying we want someone who isn’t a politician. The idea that he’s a billionaire, or by all appearances is a billionaire [laughs] – I’m not quite sure what we’re going to find out at the end of this what his net worth is – but they liked the way that he clearly didn’t buy into what is considered conventional wisdom about what a politician should be.”

The post-mortem is to reopen next month when Clinton publishes her account, What Happened. Franken believes that Russian meddling, including the hacking of Clinton campaign emails and the deliberate distribution of fake news in social media, certainly played a part, but there were “a lot of things that ultimately Hillary did wrong”.

He explains: “I thought they played defence, especially once the Access Hollywood stuff [the infamous video in which Trump bragged about groping women] came out, which was: ‘OK, this guy, it cannot happen, all we have to do is keep saying how terrible he is, instead of saying this is our agenda.’ And I think that also there was a piece with her agenda which was very listy and white papery and not from the gut.”

Al Franken on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 14 March 2017. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Clinton was also accused of playing “identity politics” by embracing racial, religious and sexual minorities at the expense of the white working class in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which she narrowly lost. Franken blames the right for trying to drive a wedge between progressives and so-called economic populists like Sanders.

“There is a tension there, because certainly, working-class whites have been messaged by the right, I think, to blame poor people for being poor and people of colour or the Democrats are just giving away stuff to buy their votes. Trump saying, like, ‘What do you have to lose? Vote for me,’ was more toward white people than it was, I think, toward black voters. It was basically saying, ‘Democrats play the identity politics, they take them for granted, they don’t do anything for them other than cater and ... erm, erm, you know ...”

He breaks out of character again. “I’m looking for a word, I can’t find it. You’re a writer, what’s a verb for, erm, catering to people and telling them what they want to hear?”

The Guardian offers: “Pandering?”

“There you go,” Franken says, erupting with mirth. “Thank you. I’m old. I’m 66. I worry about all this. I couldn’t find ‘pander’ for like 30 seconds [laughs loudly] and then I had to be told it. Very, very worrying [laughs].

“Anyway, so of course there’s a division and that has been exploited by the right a lot by saying: OK, white working-class people who haven’t been getting ahead for 40 years who expected that their birthright as white middle-class working people was that your life would get better, in the same way that I believed you had to have a plan to fail, that you were entitled to your kids doing better than you did, and their kids, and for 40 years that didn’t happen, and that gets you mad.”

Had it succeeded, Trump’s attempt to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s healthcare law would have caused even more pain to those very same people, experts said. Unlike some wary Democrats, Franken has long been unapologetic in his support for universal healthcare.



“I want it where everyone can get care: that’s what I think we should go for. In 2009, when we were putting together the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I would have done the single-payer in a minute but we needed 60 votes and” – he deadpans – “we were about 50 votes short. So that was a little problem, you know. Now we don’t have the presidency, so let’s build on the ACA ... I think Americans have come a long way and very often, I saw in polling, people would rather go to single-payer.”

Franken supporter Lisa Kleven: ‘There was talk of people worrying that he was a comedian, but he’s a good guy with honesty and integrity.’ Photograph: David Smith/The Guardian

‘I think the president should be someone who wants to be president’

Franken’s admirers include David Litt, lead writer on four of Barack Obama’s White House correspondents’ dinner presentations and author of the memoir Thanks, Obama. “Al Franken is a very smart senator,” he says by phone. “He understands the issues with a depth many of the other senators don’t have. The defining characteristic of Al Franken as a senator is he does his homework and the defining characteristic of Donald Trump is he doesn’t read anything beyond half a page.”

Litt adds: “Comedy is a tool in the toolbox in a way that it wasn’t before and if you are able to to be precise and funny and, frankly, go viral on the internet, that is an arrow in your quiver.”

So, mindful of the woman in the homemade “Franken 2020” T-shirt, will Franken himself step up? Once again, he is straightforward. “No. It’s very flattering that people do that, very flattering that she had done it, but you know, I think the president should be someone who wants to be president [laughs]. As a senator, I’ve got a lot closer look at the presidency than I had as a comedian and it’s a really, really high pressured job, obviously.

“Mine’s kind of high pressured, too, but I think that the president, that’s a punishing, punishing job, and I’m glad there are people who’ve done it who I think were equipped to handle it. I don’t think that this president really is. Maybe it’s not from lack of desire to want to be president. But to me, you want someone there who can handle that unbelievable pressure day in day out and that’s not something I’ve wanted to do. This is enough.”

Is Franken bluffing? Jacobs, the University of Minnesota academic, thinks not. “It’s not going to happen. We’ve spent time together previously and he said, ‘Absolutely not. I wouldn’t have written that book if I was going to run for higher office. And I would be doing readings in Iowa and New Hampshire.’

“I agree with that. First, his track record is so explosive: he’s got jokes about rape. I guarantee that would come back to life. Second, running for president involves putting your life on hold for two or three years. It’s like a root canal. He doesn’t want to do that.”

In short, Franken is liberated from both his past and his potential future, not having to weigh every word and court every potential donor. He will continue to watch the White House’s theatre of the absurd as it outstrips even the most fevered comic imagination. To take just one example, there was the day that then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer broke Godwin’s law by comparing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with Adolf Hitler, whom he claimed had not used chemical weapons against his own people.

Franken, who is Jewish, was amused, rather than offended. “The point at which he realised he’d done this was a very funny point. My goodness, and he just went like, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh Lord! Oh, my God! I just said that Assad’s worse than Hitler because Hitler didn’t use poison gas. Oh Lord! Oh.’ And then that’s how you get the ‘Holocaust centres’ [laughs], because I know what that is. I couldn’t find ‘pander’!’ [laughs] I couldn’t find ‘pander’.”