Playboy's 20Q: Al Franken

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[Q] Playboy: Your recent book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, became a best-seller after Fox News and Bill O'Reilly tried to block you from using their "fair and balanced" slogan. That was your plan all along, right?

[A] Franken: The lawsuit was the best thing that ever happened to the book. People have tried to find some kind of explanation for how Fox could have been that stupid, and the best theory is that I hypnotized them. I saw both O'Reilly and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes when I spoke at the 2002 Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner. I must have said, "Within a year and a half you will sue me, and you will forget this when I snap my fingers." Fox sent a letter to my publisher threatening to sue if we didn't remove O'Reilly's picture from the cover, and my publisher was a little nervous. I said, "No, they're just trying to intimidate us. I know my rights as a satirist. O'Reilly is a public figure, and we have absolutely no danger of losing." I said our response to them should be, "Please, please, please sue us." When my Rush Limbaugh book came out I had my editor send him a copy with a note that said, "Al thinks it would help sales if you mentioned the book on your show." He did not. Rush is a little smarter than these Fox guys. I can't believe how stupid they were.

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[Q] Playboy: You've called Limbaugh a big fat idiot and dubbed conservative commentator Ann Coulter a hysterical diva. Did you miss the high school debate club meeting in which the moderator warned against personal attacks?

[A] Franken: No. I wrestled and I was in the drama club. I do personal attacks only on people who specialize in personal attacks. Like when Limbaugh said that the Clintons not only have a White House cat, they have a White House dog and showed a picture of then-13-year-old Chelsea. That's beyond the pale, and fuck you, Rush. It's now open season on you, and I can call you fat. Somebody had to get into the mud with him and stop him. It's just the bully on the playground. You stand up to the guy, and he wusses out.

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[Q] Playboy: Cable news displays a voracious appetite for talking heads. Are the standards too low to enter punditry these days?

[A] Franken: What's too low are the expectations of a pundit. A lot of punditry is getting an intern to get you two articles on school vouchers. You read them and you're an expert on school vouchers. Then you argue your side for three minutes. One of the huge ironies of 24-hour cable news is that for some reason they just don't have enough time for your interview. I discovered this while promoting my book. "I wish we could have had you on longer, but we have just five minutes." It's 24-hour cable! If I were to design a 24-hour cable network, there would be a little more breathing room.

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[Q] Playboy: The Bushes, father and son, attended Yale. The Frankens, father and daughter, graduated from Harvard. Don't you just love the tradition of alumni legacies at prestigious colleges?

[A] Franken: My daughter got in on merit. So did I, since my dad didn't graduate from high school. When I was at Harvard I noticed there were a lot of legacies, and some of them weren't the smartest kids in the class. But I never heard a Cabot or a Lowell complain that this legacy thing made them suspect, which is supposedly why affirmative action is so bad, because African Americans feel, "Oh, I hate affirmative action because people think I didn't deserve to get in." I never hear black kids complaining about it; I hear white people saying that black kids complain about it. My kids aren't off-the-charts brilliant; they're just really smart, hardworking, interesting kids. But that doesn't assure admittance, because things are so competitive these days. I don't think it hurts to be the child of a celebrity.

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[Q] Playboy: Were the seeds of liberalism sown early in your life in Minnesota?

[A] Franken: My dad was a Republican. He voted for Herbert Hoover twice. In 1964 he became a Democrat because of Barry Goldwater's stance on civil rights. My dad was a card-carrying member of the NAACP. We're Jewish, and during the whole civil rights thing he'd say no Jew could ever be against civil rights. That was pounded into us. There are real Minnesota roots there. In many ways I'm still a Hubert Humphrey Democrat—someone who believes in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. A society is judged by how it treats the elderly, the sick, the impoverished. To me it's a matter of ethics and compassion.

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[Q] Playboy: Were you astounded by the battle over the Ten Commandments—engraved rock being removed from the Alabama state supreme courthouse?

[A] Franken: It was pretty funny, the state chief justice defying a court order. It's cut-and-dried. The public square is not a place to put religious symbols. Religion has thrived in this country because we have separation of church and state. Theocracies? Notice how well Iran is doing.

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[Q] Playboy: Can we assume that you're not a proponent of school prayer?

[A] Franken: If you want to pray in school, pray to yourself. I went to public school until 10th grade, and then I went to a private school that was founded around the turn of the century as a school for Protestant boys. They started letting in Jews in the 1950s to keep the SAT scores up. We had chapel in the morning. I honestly liked chapel, but I didn't sing the hymns, because they were Protestant. So at the end of math class one day my teacher said, "Franken, I notice you don't sing the hymns in chapel." I told him I was Jewish and there was a lot of Jesus in there and it would be disrespectful to the hymns themselves to sing them if I didn't believe them. I pulled that out of my ass. He said, "You want to get into a good college, don't you? You're going to need a good math grade. I'd sing the hymns." And the next day I was singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" as loud as anyone.

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[Q] Playboy: You're a golfer. Do liberals exhibit a propensity to nudge the ball to a better lie because they perceive it to be disadvantaged?

[A] Franken: Some poll of CEOs found that something like 82 percent of them cheat at golf. I'm not good, but I like playing. I caddied as a kid. I was in Tampa recently and gave a speech to some insurance sales execs, and I played golf with them. I hear Clinton was pretty good. Sure he was: "That's a gimme." [laughs]

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[Q] Playboy: You earn a substantial portion of your income on the corporate lecture circuit. Have you become a court jester to the country club set?

[A] Franken: Almost all the corporate groups I speak to are anywhere from 60 percent to 95 percent conservative. I always start off with, "It's great to be speaking to you insurance executives. And looking out at your white faces, it's great to see that this group hasn't given in to all that affirmative action nonsense." And they always laugh. Then I say that I'm a liberal but I've discovered Democrats can't afford me. They howl at that, because it makes them feel rich. Then I make fun of them, they laugh, and then they pay me. Everyone wins. I can say anything I want. It's just about how I frame it. I go after them, but they love it because people have an actual sense of humor in this country. Try working a Dutch audience sometime.

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[Q] Playboy: Now that Bob Hope has departed the scene, will we be seeing Al Franken entertaining the troops every Christmas?

[A] Franken: This Christmas I'm going to Afghanistan and Kuwait. We're not going to Saudi Arabia, but we are going to Iraq, and I think we can take cheerleaders there. It will be my fourth time entertaining overseas, but I've never been this far forward. I went to Kosovo while there was still some shooting. I was shot at. We were going over the Sar Mountains in a helicopter. I could see the tracers, and it made me really nervous. But the guys in the helicopter didn't seem nervous. They get shot at, and they take evasive action. I love our men and women in uniform, and it breaks my heart that they're getting killed day in and day out and that the president lied to us about why we were going to war. There was a case to be made about this war—Saddam defied the UN for 12 years—if Bush had only treated us like adults.

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[Q] Playboy: Ridicule and pranks—two ways Al Franken seeks to raise the level of public discourse?

[A] Franken: I like to ridicule bad people. Ridicule is one of the arrows in my quiver. I don't play pranks that much. The prank in my book about Bob Jones University was actually my wife's idea. She thought it would be funny to take our son down to Bob Jones as if he were looking at it. It's a really right-wing, Christian nutcase sort of place. This was when they had a ban on interracial dating. I just wanted to be in an information session and ask questions like "Could Tiger Woods date anybody? Could he even go out with himself?" It's amazing how restrictive the place is. Girls and boys aren't even allowed to touch.

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[Q] Playboy: Why did you challenge a National Review editor to a fight?

[A] Franken: I saw Rich Lowry say on C-Span that liberals have sissified politics. I called him the next day and challenged him. He said, "A fight? Where would it be?" I told him it would be in my parking garage. He asked about the rules. I said, "No rules." He asked if I fought a lot. I told him I'd never fought, but I knew I could beat his ass because I wrestled in high school and he looked like a wimp. I don't believe in fighting, but if someone accuses us of sissifying politics, I figure I've got to stand up for Democrats. I also wanted to shame the guy. I knew he wouldn't fight me. He seemed so scared and confused.

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[Q] Playboy: Now that you've climbed into the rhetorical ring with all those guys, do you have your own fanatical followers?

[A] Franken: When I wrote the Rush book, I was very worried that some Limbaugh dittohead would sucker punch me at the signings. So I always looked down the line and tried to pick out the weirdest-looking guy, and invariably he'd turn out to be my biggest fan.

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[Q] Playboy: Do you see yourself ever holding office?

[A] Franken: No. I would be crushed by the sense of responsibility. Voting on whether to authorize the use of force is a big decision, especially on a close call. I don't know if I could handle that. That's what you're doing when you elect someone: You're giving them the opportunity to handle it.

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[Q] Playboy: David Brock, an author known for his anti-Clinton works, recanted in Blinded by the Right. What would it take for Al Franken's name to appear on the masthead of National Review or The Weekly Standard?

[A] Franken: A concussion.

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[Q] Playboy: We keep hearing the phrase "What would Jesus do?" Any ideas?

[A] Franken: I have some idea from my understanding of the New Testament and The Dummies' Guide to the Life of Jesus. I know that Jesus wouldn't be doing what this administration is doing. Jesus talked about helping the meek, he talked about the poor, and he talked about mercy and compassion.

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[Q] Playboy: You make your home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, an area well-known for its liberal population. We might not expect those people to connect with NRA types, but couldn't they find some enjoyment in Nascar?

[A] Franken: I don't believe that some knowledge crowds out other knowledge, so there's certainly no harm. I was amazed when my daughter and I went down to Charlotte to see Duke play in the ACC finals—we're both big Duke fans—and Nascar was on the radio. I can see maybe sitting and watching the cars go in a circle and learning the fine techniques of racing. But listen on the radio?

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[Q] Playboy: You own a trove of Nixon memorabilia. Do you really miss the guy?

[A] Franken: He was a better president than the one we have now. A lot of people say he was a terrible domestic president because of Watergate but a good foreign policy president because of China. I think he was a terrible foreign policy president because of Vietnam but a pretty good domestic president. When the Republican revolution attempted to dismantle the government, it was really Nixon stuff they were going after. He started OSHA. He started the EPA. Except for his paranoia and anti-Semitism and all that stuff, he wasn't so bad. I really loved his resignation, though. Man, he was a great comedic character. When Tom Davis and I started in comedy, we did so much Nixon material that we would switch off playing him. If Nixon were talking to Henry Kissinger, Tom would be Nixon. If Nixon were talking to David Eisenhower, I'd be Nixon. That's how much Nixon we did.

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[Q] Playboy: You were present at the creation of Saturday Night Live in 1975. Could you have predicted that it would still be on the air today?

[A] Franken: I got to SNL the first day of the show, when Lorne Michaels and the writers came in. At the time, the only comedy-variety shows were Carol Burnett, which was a very good show but totally different generationally, and Sonny and Cher, which was a piece of shit. I know Sonny died, but he should be ashamed. I met Danny Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, and I said to myself, This is going to be a huge hit. They were a generation of comedians who had grown up with TV and had a certain attitude about its bursting the dam. Of course, that was youthful hubris. Now that I've been in show business for 30 years, I know not to think something like that.

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[Q] Playboy: On SNL, you announced that the 1980s were the Al Franken Decade. Did things work out okay for you in those 10 years?

[A] Franken: The 1980s were a great decade for me personally. Both my kids were born then. But this decade is very good for me too. I'm working on the Al Franken Millennium. I would like to be here for the end of the millennium to see what effect I have on things in 2999.