More than anything, though, Giant of the Senate seems to be an announcement that Franken is back to being funny, after nine years of doing his best straight man act. This was necessary, he explains, to get voters to take him seriously, which he seems to have achieved (he skated to a comfortable reelection in 2014). But it also speaks to how different the landscape of 2017 is. When Franken first ran for Senate, emerging victorious over the incumbent Norm Coleman only after a recount, and with a razor-thin margin of 312 votes, his background as an entertainer was seen as a negative. Now, it’s why a handful of commentators have pitched him as the perfect opponent for Donald Trump in 2020.

Franken has denied that he has any interest in running for president, and readers can only take him as his word. But you could easily mistake Giant of the Senate as one of those hefty tomes that precede a bid for office, only with better anecdotes and far less pomp (it’s hard to imagine Elizabeth Warren, say, authoring a footnote that starts with, “A few notes about farting”). Franken briefly details his childhood in southern Minnesota as the grandson of German immigrants; meeting his wife, Franni, during his first week at Harvard; and his seemingly effortless path from doing shows at the Comedy Store after college to being hired in 1975 for a new late-night NBC show being put together by a 30-year-old producer named Lorne Michaels. That show, obviously, became SNL, or, as Franken describes it, “a touchstone for generations of overentertained, uninformed Americans.”

This isn’t an SNL memoir, and though a chapter is titled “Saturday Night Live (The Drug Part),” Franken mostly skates over the loss of first John Belushi, then Chris Farley, to drug abuse. He briefly acknowledges his own recreational cocaine use, and more thoughtfully describes his wife’s alcoholism and rehabilitation, which inspired the movie When a Man Loves a Woman, co-written by Franken. But he’s much more detailed when it comes to analyzing the politics of SNL, and its goal of rewarding “viewers for knowing stuff about politics without punishing them for not.” Franken’s own, decidedly liberal beliefs were why he was passed over for anchor of Weekend Update in 1994—a remarkable commitment to impartiality from a satirical comedy show.

The meat of the book, though, is in Franken’s run for Senate in 2008, and his subsequent tenure. The marginal nature of his first victory—so close it was contested in court for six months, meaning Franken wasn’t sworn in until July 2009—seemed to inspire in him a serious commitment to his new role. Or in other words, no more jokes. The rules: “I could be funny in the office, but only with members of staff, not in meetings with visitors. It was also okay to be funny on the floor with my colleagues, as long as I wasn’t loud enough to be picked up by the C-SPAN microphones. And, for God’s sake, no physical humor!”