Title Al Franken, Giant of the Senate Author Al Franken Genre Memoir Publisher Twelve Pages 406 Price $36.50

In the final stretch of his 20-year career writing for Saturday Night Live, comedian, satirist and now U.S. Senator Al Franken stepped in front of the cameras as Stuart Smalley: a fey, lisping, mentally unstable parody of nineties self-help culture and host of a cable access show called "Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley." As part of his feel-good shtick, Franken's Smalley would stare dotingly at his own reflection and recite his mantra, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, doggone it, people like me!"

Franken's newest book, Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, expands that sense of needy self-affirmation to a book-length political memoir. Since leaving the world of comedy and broadcasting for politics, declaring his intent to secure the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party nomination for the 2008 U.S. Senate race, Franken has been hamstrung by his former career as a prominent chucklehead and professional joke writer. As an aspiring senator, Franken saw no disjoint or conflict.

"My career as a comedy writer and satirist," he writes, "had prepared me for politics by training me to pick out absurdities and inconsistencies and speak truth to power." It seems odd that Franken would need to make this case to an audience who has presumably purchased and is reading an Al Franken book. And yet, he makes it. Again and again and again.

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The book is crammed with cases in which Franken had to "litigate comedy": striking back against Republicans trying to smear him with old satirical Playboy articles, holding his tongue in Senate (or not) and grinding his inherent tendency to be biting and funny through a conceptual contraption he refers to as "the DeHumorizer."

The problem with Giant of the Senate's attempt to make the reader take Franken seriously as a comedian-turned-politician is that it clouds clear-eyed attempts to take him seriously as a politician qua politics itself.

In his grand lurch toward earnestness and self-seriousness – avoiding the spotlight, hunkering into policy and the hard, often thankless work of politics – Franken has despairingly lapsed into liberal cliché. A guy who quit Saturday Night Live in protest (twice) is found indulging the most trite, disingenuous and dangerous banalities of U.S. liberalism. And not in some knowing, ironized, obviously funny way, either.

Take the chapter where he describes meeting George W. Bush. Despite fundamentally disagreeing with Bush, Franken recalls a friendly, genial encounter, in which the two bonded over their apparent love of jokes. "Holy mackerel," Franken recalls, "I liked him. Now I understood how he got elected twice."

It's part of this larger cultural effort to recuperate Bush Jr. – who ruled as a malapropping, warmongering buffoon – as a dopey grandpa, recreational portraitist and welcome Ellen guest. Likewise, Franken lapses into an eye-roll-worthy hagiography for Barack Obama, calling him "a hero … one of the best leaders this country has ever had, a man of incredible grace and bountiful intelligence," as if he's drafting an OkCupid profile for the former U.S. president.

And when a detachment of U.S. House Democrats strategically skipped the recent Donald Trump inauguration, Franken showed up, citing such honourable notions as "the peaceful transfer of power and so on."

In such anecdotes, Franken goes out of his way to talk about his attempts to embrace bipartisanship and work productively with Republicans (even Ted Cruz, of whom he remains otherwise wholly contemptuous). It feels very much endemic of the "Sorkinization" of politics (a phrase coined in a 2012 Vanity Fair article) and the desire of Democrats to pose as some high-minded get-along gang toiling in the mines of good governance, just like on The West Wing. It's all a bit rich and calculatedly skates over the deeper ideological divides that have torn America asunder.

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There's been a lot of good writing on this idea recently, from the vulgar dirtbag leftists of popular political podcast Chapo Trap House mocking the highfalutin seriousness of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom to a longer piece in Current Affairs by Toronto writer Luke Savage. In How Liberals Fell In Love With The West Wing, Savage nails the ideology of backroom, sleeves-rolled-up American liberalism.

He writes: "The greatest political victories involve semantically dismantling an opponent's argument or exposing its hypocrisy, usually by way of some grand rhetorical gesture. Categories like left and right become less significant, provided that the competing interlocutors are deemed respectably smart and practise the designated etiquette." It's a description eerily echoed in Franken's estimation of his own political acumen, as someone who knows "how to drill down in argument to find inconsistencies that would reveal the underlying mendacity of the object of my derision."

The ascent of people such as Trump, or even Cruz, should have thoroughly disabused liberals such as Franken of the usefulness of such subtle mastery of political discourse. Of what value is exposing hypocrisy and inconsistency when so many Americans simply don't care? Of what use is exposing fallacy to the cold light of truth when people would rather happily believe the lies and the lying liars who tell them?

While the hard work (and humour) of someone such as Franken may seem estimable, it's hard to suffer any politician who would willingly prop up Bush, if only in an attempt to be high-minded and above the bipartisan fray. Such transparent gestures of across-the-aisle goodwill will no doubt continue to serve Senator Al Franken well in the crumbling corridors of Democratic power. He's good enough, he's smart enough and, doggone it, people are starting to respect him.

John Semley is a frequent contributor to Globe Books and the author of This Is a Book About the Kids in the Hall.