NEWS: Al Franken is coming to a Radio near you starting next week
Live, From the Left, It's ...
Liberals are looking to a 'Saturday Night Live' alum for salvation. Backstage with Al Franken, air warrior.
msnbc.msn.com
By Weston Kosova
Newsweek
March 29 issue - Al Franken is eating a sandwich—demolishing it, really—blissfully unaware of the barrage of wet, sticky mouth sounds he's sending into the microphone that hangs in front of his face. It's the third day of recorded rehearsals for Franken's daily radio show on Air America, a left-leaning, all-talk network that launches next week, and he's trying to choke down a quick lunch during the few minutes of commercials between segments. On the other side of the studio desk, the show's cohost, Franken's friend and radio pro Katherine Lanpher, is experiencing every note of the gastric symphony. She shoots him an amused, exasperated look. "Bet you're glad you didn't have the chips," she deadpans. It isn't the first time Franken has broken a cardinal rule of radio. "I tried to tell him yesterday he can't eat on the air." She laughs. "Listeners don't want to hear ... that."
But Franken is lost in his thoughts. He's pecking ideas into his laptop, cracking up at his own punch lines, trying to decide which of the many archenemies of the left is next in line for his special brand of verbal pounding. George Tenet? Dick Cheney? George W. Bush? Ten seconds till air. Franken looks up: "What are we doing now? Are we taking calls in this segment?"
Clearly, he has a thing or two left to learn about radio. But when the intro music fades in and the mike goes hot, any evidence of amateurishness vanishes. "I'm Al Franken," he says, "and you're listening to 'The O'Franken Factor'!" And he's off. If you know Franken only as the wiseacre "SNL" writer who gave birth to pathetic, ingratiating Stuart Smalley, brace yourself. Franken is now taking his comic anti-right, anti-Bush fire to the airwaves. Franken is genuinely, passionately outraged at what he calls the "lies" and "distortions" of the president and his fellow Republicans, especially when it comes to Iraq. "They've got to pay for that," he says. "They really do." He's never happier than when he's scorching administration officials and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity with their own words—catching them tweaking a fact or taking a quote out of context.
At one point, Franken gleefully cues up an audio clip of Donald Rumsfeld denying that Bush officials had ever said Saddam was an immediate threat—followed by his sputtering response when a reporter read him a transcript of the Defense secretary saying just that. "Did I say 'immediate threat'?" Franken asks later, slipping into his mock Rumsfeld voice. "Sure I did. Was I lying? Maybe, you tell me." Even the name of his show is a jab at Fox's Bill O'Reilly, whose "O'Reilly Factor" tops the cable ratings. One minute, Franken's doing a dead-on impression of Limbaugh reading an "ad" for "Delicious Beef-Fed Beef." The next, he might launch into one of his characters, like Liam the Loose-Boweled Leprechaun (don't ask), who is, depending on your stomach, either achingly funny or stunningly juvenile.
There's no doubt about it, Franken knows his way around a microphone. But will anyone listen? Talk radio has long been considered a conservative realm for listeners who felt on the outs during the long, lonely Clinton years and saw the mainstream press as a nest of lefties. Yet these days it's liberals who complain about feeling powerless. Enter Franken, whose cutting, seriocomic best sellers, "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," have made him a hero to the left. Franken hopes people will tune in the first time because they know his name, but will stay because they like—or hate—what they hear. "The goal of the show is to get a foothold, so that we are no longer ceding this entire terrain to the right," he says. "I think a lot of people tune in to Rush because they're interested in politics and there's nothing else on at the time."
Franken, who goes on in the same time slot as Limbaugh, is one of a handful of liberal celebs with shows on Air America. Comedian Lizz Winstead will host a program with rapper Chuck D. Comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo has her own three-hour slot in the evening. The network will go live March 31 in just four markets—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Even if the show is a hit, it could be a long time before Franken makes a serious dent in the market.
After a rehearsal last week, Franken walks outside to find a snowstorm has engulfed New York City. He begins trudging down the street from the studio to the nearest subway station, which is blocks away. Television, books and frequent corporate speeches have made him plenty of money, but he's not the kind of guy who has a car waiting for him at the curb. Given a choice, he'd spend most of his time at home with Franni, his wife of 28 years. The couple's two children are grown. Though he's lived in New York for decades, Franken, at 52, is anything but cosmopolitan. "A lot of comedians are dysfunctional human beings," says Franken's friend, congressional analyst Norman Ornstein, who will be a frequent guest on the show. "Al lives a regular life. He's fun to just hang with and watch TV." Franken's spacious, comfortable apartment on the city's Upper West Side seems much more Minnesota than Manhattan.
He still feels the tug of his home state. As a kid in Minneapolis, he watched the news at the dining-room table each day with his parents. "What I remember most was the civil-rights movement," he says. His father, a salesman and a lifelong Republican, switched parties. No Jew, he told young Al, could be for Jim Crow. Franken was a prank-puller, but a good student. At Harvard, he studied behavioral science, and did improv on weekends. Working comedy clubs in L.A. after college, he was spotted by a talent agent who got him work as a writer on "SNL" in 1975. He stayed, on and off, until the mid-'90s, and still contributes sketches to the show.
By the time Franken gets to the crowded subway station, he is soaking wet, and the lenses of his trademark horn rims are fogging at the edges. "Hey, it's Al Franken!" a young man shouts. "Hi, hi," Franken answers, smiling as he weaves through the crush of commuters. All through the station, people call out to him. "Hi, Al!" "Al Franken!" "Love the book, Al!" He shakes a hand when its offered, always polite to a fault.
Well, maybe not always. A high-school wrestler, Franken still has a taste for the rough and tumble. At a black-tie dinner in Washington last spring, Franken says, Karl Rove ribbed him for standing when the president entered the room. But Rove remembers it differently. Franken, he says, came over to him and said, "I'm Al Franken. I hate you and you hate me." Rove says he was taken aback. "I said, 'I haven't met you. You seem like a nice enough fellow, sorry to disappoint you but I don't hate you'."
Franken says that if the show works out, he can see himself doing it for years. And if it flops? He says, with total sincerity, that he is thinking about running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2008, to take back the seat lost to Republicans after his friend, Sen. Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash. Hillary Clinton has agreed to give him pointers. "She told me it would be a long conversation," he says. But that's later. For now, he's got a different kind of campaign to run, and people will be voting with their radio dials. |
