Al Franken keeps comedy in check

When Rand Paul needed a zinger, Al Franken gave him a suggestion: a self-deprecating joke about suffering through childhood with a libertarian father who wouldn’t let up on the gold standard.

“It wouldn’t have been so bad if my dad wasn’t so damn cheap,” Franken privately told Paul to use as a laugh line. “Just 50 cents in gold coins.”


Since he arrived in the Senate three years ago, the former “Saturday Night Live” star has tried to project an ultra-serious public image of a studious and hard-working senator who shuns the media spotlight and whose past career as a comedian and satirist is just that — a thing of the past.

( PHOTOS: Al Franken's career)

But behind the scenes, Al Franken is still Al Franken. He ribs fellow senators and cracks jokes, whether it’s impersonating the first Jewish man he met with a heavy West Virginia drawl or giving a mock Oscar speech before the Senate Democratic Caucus. His star power is a major draw at Democratic fundraisers, having attended a dozen events for state parties and Senate candidates across the country, including Richard Carmona in Arizona and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts.

Privately, he’s also shown his temper, such as in a previously unreported episode when Franken launched a profanity-laced tirade on White House adviser Gene Sperling in a closed-door meeting about taxes.

But Franken rarely lets his celebrity status show publicly. He almost never does interviews on Capitol Hill, doesn’t deliver one-liners or Stuart Smalley impressions in public settings and has cultivated a cautious, wonky image as the junior senator from Minnesota. He said he wanted to show colleagues he didn’t come to Congress “to take away their ink” or “jump in front of the camera” and instead wants to work on legislation.

Franken sat down recently with POLITICO for a rare interview with a non-Minnesota media outlet, and he admitted that his sense of humor has helped him build relations with his colleagues and overcome GOP skepticism after he excoriated Rush Limbaugh and other prominent conservatives in his best-selling books.

“The Republicans, I think, at first were a little like, ‘Oh, he’s a satirist who uses scorn and ridicule against Republicans,’ and then after they got to meet me, they were like, ‘Oh, he’s a comedian,’” Franken told POLITICO. “‘He’s a comedian. He’s got a good sense of humor. He likes to laugh. I get it.’ And that kind of went away, that first initial trepidation, I think went away very quickly.”

Indeed, Franken’s guffaw is a Senate staple these days, bellowing in elevators packed with senators or on the floor during votes. He let out loud cackles the other day when he asked whether West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s car ran on coal, and after he asked Republican Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt — the author of legislation to kill the Obama birth-control mandate — whether their highway bill amendment included contraceptive language.

“He’s always got a wonderful way when there’s a serious thing you’re doing, he’s got some different little plan or view on it that makes you think, you know, he ain’t that serious after all,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said with a chuckle.

The 61-year-old Franken, though, is not all jokes. His early Hill efforts have targeted Comcast’s joint venture with NBC Universal, health insurers’ high administrative costs, practices at credit-rating agencies and arbitration mandates of defense contractors. His politics put him firmly in the liberal wing of the Senate Democratic Caucus, so he sometimes is at odds with White House officials.

And he lets them know about it.

“He’s very good at making sure the White House knows the work he’s doing, and the U.S. Senate is doing — and he doesn’t take any packaged answer as the answer,” said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). “He refuses to take that. And if you start giving it, and you’re from the administration, then buckle in because it ain’t gonna work.”

David Axelrod was on the receiving end of a furious Franken rant over the administration’s health care tactics during a 2010 retreat at the Newseum. And more recently, Sperling — the president’s senior economic adviser — wouldn’t answer Franken directly about the administration’s intent on eliminating tax breaks for high earners. Franken, several sources said, cursed and tore into Sperling.

The two men brush off the incident now, and Franken calls Sperling a friend. Sperling told POLITICO that he loves the “passion and depth of conviction [Franken] brings to any policy debate.”

“Normally we agree, but when we disagree, we can mix it up with candor, no hard feelings and mutual respect,” Sperling said in a statement. “That’s one of the things I like most about him.”

Asked about his colleagues’ recollections that he directed foul language toward Sperling, Franken suddenly turned serious.

“Those are privileged meetings,” Franken deadpanned. “If you heard that from somebody, then they are breaking a privilege that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.”

But Franken could barely contain his laughter, letting out a chortle that could have shaken the Hart Senate Office building.

“That’s my response,” he said, still laughing. “And you can print that.”

Not all of his flare-ups have been laughing matters. In a private meeting last month on the first floor of the Capitol where more than 30 of his colleagues from both parties discussed the fiscal crisis, Franken stood up and asked how they could be expected to reach a deal when the Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, had publicly stated that his top goal was to see President Barack Obama’s defeat. The bipartisan mood immediately turned sour, according to two senators in the room.

Franken later acknowledged he “probably could have done a better job” making his case at the meeting.

“The point I was trying to make is when we’re facing something this important and this difficult, that we need to be totally frank with each other,” Franken said. “But in making that point, I was maybe a little too frank.”

McConnell had a frank exchange with Franken in 2010, when the GOP leader thought the Democrat — who was presiding over the Senate at the time — had been mocking him when he detailed his opposition to Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination on the floor.

“This isn’t ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al,” McConnell told Franken, sources said. Franken later apologized to McConnell.

But Franken has shown some humor can smooth over tense relations, including with Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who in 2009 sharply criticized the Democrat’s amendment to bar federal contracts to defense firms that forced employees to use their companies’ arbitration process when pressing workplace discrimination claims. Franken confronted Corker on the Senate floor about an op-ed he co-wrote criticizing the plan, and later got into a heated argument with the Republican and his staffer.

The two have since developed a friendly rapport.

“Generally, most of our conversations are about humor,” Corker said. “I kidded with him one day when I was watching him preside, and it just brought flashbacks to ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

The contractor amendment later became law, giving Franken one of his first legislative victories. It was inspired by the story of a former KBR employee, Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleged that she was gang-raped when stationed in Baghdad, and then wanted to have her day in court. But last year, a jury dismissed her claims.

Franken said he has no regrets in pushing the bill into law even though Jones’s claims did not hold up before a jury, saying others working for defense contractors who have been sexually assaulted can now take their claims to court rather than through a company’s mandated arbitration process.

“Politics isn’t about winning elections, it’s about improving people’s lives,” Franken said, repeating a mantra of his political hero and predecessor, the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone.

Even though he’s worked with Republicans on narrowly targeted issues, such as diabetes prevention with Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), some believe Franken’s style will make it impossible for him to be taken seriously as a bipartisan deal maker.

“There is no way ever — ever — you could work with Al Franken on a major, serious bipartisan issue,” said one Republican senator. “He’s a partisan.”

But it’s Franken’s famously partisan past that has made him a hit with Democratic donors. To entertain fundraising crowds, he’ll often hand-draw U.S. maps and auction them off, as he did recently for Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. He has helped the Senate Democratic super PAC, Majority PAC, raise money, and his own Midwest Values PAC has given $310,000 this cycle for candidates and causes as diverse as EMILY’s List, Montana Sen. Jon Tester and the Indiana Democratic Party.

Franken said he thinks of his jokes spontaneously, like he did in 2010 after he won the Golden Gavel, a mock gift awarded to senators for completing the wildly unexciting task of presiding over the Senate for at least 100 hours. But Franken acted like he had just won the Oscar, delivering a teary-eyed speech, thanking staff and senior senators for their refusal to preside over the body. The caucus erupted in laughter.

“I don’t know if there’s a doctor who can help him be as dull as people think most senators are,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “He’s just funny.”