Consider the myth of the regular guy politician. He’s an outsider. He gets results precisely because he doesn’t understand the point of ordinary political entanglements—of lobbyists, polls, or slick consultants. He speaks his mind and his mind is always on the interests of regular guy Americans who are just like him.

We know this figure from American films and television. There are a heap of comedies in this genre, most of them made in that post-Cold War, pre-9/11 period when people started to get really sick of politicians, but the stakes were relatively low. Bulworth, Man of the Year, Head of State, My Fellow Americans, The Distinguished Gentleman, Dave—in these movies, regular guys become politicians, or politicians become regular guys, and everything magically turns out well. The problem with politics, these films argue, is politicians. And if we just got them out of the way, America would be fine.

AL FRANKEN, GIANT OF THE SENATE by Al Franken Twelve, 416 pp., $28

Well, now we have our first regular guy president. Donald Trump may have been a billionaire reality television star before he was elected, but he shares many of the regular guy politician’s attributes. What he and Bulworth and Mays Gilliam and Dave have in common is the idea that keeping it real—speaking your mind freely, without calculating self-censorship—is what makes a good president. We have learned the hard way that it is not.

But there is hope yet for regular guy politics—maybe you just need the right guy. Senator Al Franken’s political memoir Al Franken, Giant of the Senate does what so many outsider politicians have failed to do: It demystifies politics while making a surprisingly strong—and surprisingly moving—case on behalf of political engagement. Partly masquerading as a satire of the political memoir (easily the worst genre publishing has to offer), it’s a clear-eyed look at how things work in Washington and, most importantly, how frustrating it is when they don’t. It’s also funny, the surest sign that Franken may actually be a regular person.

Franken’s first two books, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (1996) and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003), were prescient critiques of unhinged right-wingers and the mass media that amplified their message. Rush Limbaugh, like Franken’s Indecision 1992 Comedy Central special, predated The Daily Show both in its tone and style: snide and smart, with an emphasis on digging through archives for damning material. Franken was a trailblazer on the left, and it’s surprising that publishers didn’t turn his style of satire into a cottage industry, the way that conservative publishers bankrolled their operations with books about how the Clintons were murderers and Barack Obama was an illegal alien usurper. These were accessible, funny books about how things really work—and, deep down, how they should work.