Not long after Al Franken won his three-hundred-and-twelve-vote landslide victory, in 2009, and became Minnesota’s junior senator, I called his office to set up what I had hoped would be a series of interviews leading to a Profile in the magazine. We’d rather not, came the answer. Franken and his aides were all too aware of the road that such an article was likely to travel: a writer and star of “Saturday Night Live” goes to Washington. They just didn’t want to hear more about Stuart Smalley, the self-help guru, or the Senator’s incomparable Mick Jagger imitation, and they certainly did not want to field questions about who was doing how much coke in the bathrooms and writers’ rooms of 30 Rock.

Franken had just survived a campaign in which his old jokes were used as weapons against him, the better to make him seem like a degenerate and a louse. He was, to say the least, neither; he was a comedian, an entirely different matter. But now his aides, not unwisely, wanted Franken to learn the issues and form relationships in the Senate—to become a legislator taken no less seriously than what’s left of the best of the Senate. And so they wheeled out what Franken calls the DeHumorizer. Every day, Franken donned a proper suit and a serious expression, and keep the laughing to an absolute minimum, no matter how preposterous life on Capitol Hill got. Any remarks he might have made about the less attractive qualities of his colleagues, well, he tried to “save them for the car,” as he puts it.

But once Franken won reëlection, and won it handily, he seemed liberated. The DeHumorizer, while still installed in his Senate closet, was no longer set on “high.” Sometimes it was turned off entirely. The author of such tomes as “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” seemed prepared now to display his split persona in all its fullness: the comedian, who is capable of going wisecrack for wisecrack with Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee; and the credible, studious, liberal senator, who questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions unrelentingly during Sessions’s hearings before the Judiciary Committee.

Recently, Franken published “Al Franken: Giant of the Senate,” a tale that spins from a witty recounting of his upbringing, his show-business career, his election battles, and his time on the Hill, to a dead-serious look at his political influences, his wife’s early struggle with poverty and, later, alcoholism, and his hopes for American politics. It is an honest and funny piece of work, a real book, by a real person, not one of those staff-assembled products for electoral use. Franken writes movingly about political heroes like Paul Wellstone, scathingly about Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, and mercilessly about Donald Trump. (“When Trump demanded an investigation into those three to five million fraudulent votes, it reminded me of O. J. Simpson, who, after being acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and Ron Goldman, vowed to spent the rest of his life ‘finding the killer or killers.’ ”)

Clearly, Franken has won the respect, and often the wonder, of many of his colleagues. Last week, we met to do an interview for The New Yorker Radio Hour at his publisher’s office. Franken told me that while he and his Democratic Party colleagues were discussing health-care strategy, they were also absorbing Ryan Lizza’s article on newyorker.com about Lizza’s curious phone call with Anthony Scaramucci, who was then the White House director of communications. Franken seemed genuinely proud that he was the one called upon by several of his colleagues in the Democratic caucus to explain what it meant to “cock-block” someone. For the purposes of broadcast radio, however, the senator skillfully used the term “penis-block” to avoid any problems with government censorship. Franken, after all, was raised on George Carlin and “the seven words you can’t say on television”—and terrestrial radio. Anyway, a few days after our conversation, the Mooch was gone.

DAVID REMNICK: The other night, John McCain gave a remarkable speech. And he said many things, and one of them was that the Senate, as an institution, is not “overburdened by greatness.” When you go into the Senate every day, are you filled with a feeling of—

SENATOR AL FRANKEN: Awe?

REMNICK: Awe, or, as he was expressing, a kind of—not just disappointment but almost a revulsion about what’s happened to the “deliberative body”?

FRANKEN: I get all of those. I have a number of my colleagues who I am in awe of.

REMNICK: Who are they?

FRANKEN: Sheldon Whitehouse, just on policy after policy, but especially on things like climate change and campaign-finance reform—he’s been such a leader. I’m in awe of Dick Durbin. He can, better than anyone I know, just talk extemporaneously. And I thought it was an awesome move by Chuck Schumer when John McCain, who I’m in awe of, put his thumb down, and there was some applause—I think from staff—and Chuck turned and went, no, basically.

REMNICK: That there shouldn’t be applause.

FRANKEN: Absolutely.

REMNICK: Why is that? That’s not the decorum of the floor?

FRANKEN: Yeah, and we shouldn’t—no gloating. It was a big victory, because it meant that we’re going to have to—that we get to—work in a bipartisan way to address what in the Affordable Care Act isn’t working as well as it should.

REMNICK: My understanding was that the Republicans knew that John McCain was going to vote against the so-called “skinny” health-care bill, but the Democratic side did not. You didn’t know that this vote was coming?

FRANKEN: I did not know this for sure—I didn’t know it. I started, at a certain point, because of body language— [Laughs.] See, I have what’s called “emotional I.Q.” [Laughs.]

REMNICK: [Laughs.] What was the body language?

FRANKEN: [Laughs.] The body language was [Mike] Pence talking to [Lisa] Murkowski, and getting nowhere, and her jaw being set. And then Pence walking out of the room.

REMNICK: Right there on the floor, during the deliberations.

FRANKEN: And if they had the votes, he would have sat in the chair. Like he did, I guess, the previous day, when they got the fifty [votes], for him to cast the tie-breaking vote.

REMNICK: John McCain—he is quite possibly mortally ill. Do you think that influenced the action he took?

FRANKEN: I don’t know. I don’t know.

REMNICK: Could he have made that speech a year ago?

FRANKEN: Yes. I listened to that speech and I went, Well, why didn’t you vote no? And that’s what happened at the end. He was basically saying, we should be doing this in regular order, we should be having hearings of the health committees—Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—a bipartisan effort to do this through the normal process. And then the conclusion from that is, well, then vote no, and we can get on with that.

What’s interesting about this whole thing is they had seven, seven-and-a-half years to figure this out, the repeal and replace. They’re obviously using Obamacare as a successful political football, just bashing and bashing and bashing it—but did they work on a repeal-and-replace plan for seven years? Well, clearly not.

REMNICK: And that’s something that McCain did seem to recognize, seemed to recognize a kind of intellectual corruption in his party and in the institution. I guess people want to know, what’s going on? The approval ratings for Congress are somewhere on the level of journalists and arsonists. It’s low, it’s really low. What’s happened?