I’m a little late with this one – but, given Al Franken’s latest ad buy (“I was a comedian, er, satirist; sometimes the jokes went off the mark, but that’s comedy.  Minnesota’s future is no joke to me”), I think it’s timely enough.

Last week sometime, Aaron Brown of “Minnesota Brown” kind of summed up the real problem with Franken and his past – quite possibly without knowing it.

Democrat Al Franken, an unusual candidate facing unusual challenges, is fighting to reestablish the narrative of a campaign which has been mired in talk of his past. Franken’s past does not include any of the things most politicians must explain or deny: he has no shady land dealings, love children or criminal activities; but he did enjoy a long, successful career in comedic writing.

And that – along with a hideously expensive, failed radio show – is it.   That’s all there is to Franken’s past.  He went from “Minnesota grade school kid” to “Harvard guy” to “SNL/comedian/satirist” to “liberal talk show host” to “candidate”. 

That is all. 

 This career produced reams of smart and somewhat unsmart jokes and a regretable tax reporting error that has been corrected. And that is the sum of the GOP incumbent’s campaign strategy.

 What else is there to talk about?  He’s never voted on a bill.  He’s never pushed for – or rejected – an earmark.  He’s never written or passed a budget.  He’s never been elected to catch dogs.

He’s written written, joked and talked about politics.

So has Aaron Brown, and for that matter yours truly (indeed, I’ve probably written more about politics than Al Franken has in six years of blogging). 

What else can Coleman address?

Oh, by the way…

 Anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about comedy knows that the moment you have to explain a joke, that joke becomes unfunny, indeed, poisonous. Which is why a rather good campaign by Franken has struggled against a relatively unpopular incumbent with eerily white teeth, Sen. Norm Coleman.

…Mr. Brown will need to explain the teeth reference.

But we digress:

But here’s my personal, highly anecdotal experience. If you were ever at some point far too young for your parents to let you watch Saturday Night Live, especially in the late 1980s and ‘90s when the show took some more crass turns, and then aged to a point where there was some doubt if you were old enough so you snuck over to a friends’ house to watch it, you aren’t bothered by Al Franken’s comedic past.

If you didn’t start sneaking in to watch the show until the late eighties, you have little idea who Al Franken was.  I started sneaking downstairs to watch the show when Chevy Chase still hosted Weekend Update.  And Franken was everywhere on the show back then.  So no, Franken’s comedic past doesn’t bother me (although given the number of droughts SNL has suffered through while Franken was writing for the show, it doesn’t exactly turn my comedic crank, either).  

In fact, if you are a Democrat of that age your first political book was probably “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.” That book probably influenced your awareness of irony not just in comedy, but in politics.

So that’s what we have to thank for Markos Moulitsas, Jesus’ General, the Democrat Underground and the chanting masses of droogs in Jon Stewart’s audience. 

And so, you probably knew about Franken’s past “low” humor in addition to his many moments of deep insight (the kind of insight that would be useful in some kind of lofty federal office from a prominnt Midwestern state other than Wisconsin).

I’m struggling to remember a moment of “insight” “deeper” than “This is the decade of Al Franken”.  Feel free to fill me in.

 If you are unfamiliar with Franken’s very real transition from SNL jokester to satirist, however, the idea of a comedian gradually shifting gears over to public service seems to many as crazy as that crazy wrestler we elected governor and wasn’t that crazy! Damn kids!

You mean Dean Barkley and Tim Penny’s sock puppet our former “governor”, the 9/11 Truther?  You “kids” have some ‘splainin’ to do.

To get to what is perhaps Aaron Brown’s larger point – the higher-level concept that’s uncontaminated by inconvenient reality – let’s say a conservative comic were to run for, say, Senate.  Let’s say Dennis Miller (I know, more a libertarian than a conservative, but he’s right on most of the issues, and much funnier and politically cogent than Franken ever was) moved to Minnesota to take on Amy “A-Klo” Klobuchar in 2012. 

What would A-Klo’s campaign have to work with, other than thirty years of comedy?  From Dusk ‘Til Dawn Bordello of Blood?  Monday Night Football?   Joe Dirt? His switch from frowzy lefty to 9/11 libertarian?

Would A-Klo be at a loss for much more to talk about in re Miller?

What more is there to Al Franken?

I submit for your approval:  Nothing.

Discuss.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Campaign '08, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.