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On Saturday Night Live in 1977, writer-performer Al Franken — or, in the comic self-promotional character he played called "Me, Al Franken" — announced that he might run for President. In 2008, he will most likely run for U.S. Senator from his home state of Minnesota. As he says of his presumed opponent, Norm Coleman, "Id be the only New York Jew in the race who is actually from Minnesota." For now, Franken writes best-selling Right-baiting books and hosts a daily three-hour show on Air America Radio, a perch from which he inveighs against the White House and Congress and promotes virtually any Democrat running for virtually anything.
Al Franken: God Spoke, by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, is most interesting in revealing the similarities between standup comedy and campaigning: in both venues, the speaker needs to charm his listeners and stir them to applause (the manual version of voting). Franken is a serious guy with irresistible comic impulses. The tummler in him cant understand why a top politico would advise him not to tell his favorite joke — one by Buddy Hackett, about a penis growing out of a mans forehead — on the campaign trail.
Yet he is often feisty when hes supposed to be bantering, as when he crosses words with leggy super-mutilator Ann Coulter, or Bill OReilly, belligerent host of The OReilly Factor on Fox News. Frankens radio show was originally called The OFranken Factor, with the simple aim of annoying OReilly and provoking a lawsuit from him. Its a pleasant irony that, for all his importance in lowering the level of TVs political discourse to barrier reef depths, OReillys lasting legacy may be that he diverted the careers of two men: one (Al Franken) who could become a U.S. Senator, and another (Stephen Colbert) whose parody of The Factor has earned him a huge fan base and, after his fearless speech of the White House Press Corps dinner, the smoldering silence of the Washington elite.
The movie is a record of two years in Frankens life, from the publication of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right through the aftermath of the 2004 election. In its concentration on the Air America stint, the film inevitably covers much the same material as last years Left of the Dial. But its a frank-seeming portrait of a man who can always attract a crowd of autograph seekers, even at the Republican National Convention of 2004. (Franken takes it in stride, noting, In this country, celebrity trumps ideology.) He is a kind of crucial figure, for he straddles a span that continues to shrink: the space between politicians who want to be more TV-friendly and comedians who have, in the absence of any charisma among elected Democrats, become the spokesmen for the American Left.
The U.S. isnt the only country where that chasm is becoming a nexus. In Italy, Sabina Guzzanti is a self-described buffoon (it has a slightly loftier connotation in Italian) and TV personality. In 2003 she launched a weekly show of political satire called RaiOt — for the network that carried it, RAI Tre, and the English word Riot. The comedy she perpetrated was unexceptional: getting made up as Silvio Berlusconi, Italys head of state, and telling jokes about him. But the show was cancelled after one airing, possibly because Berlusconi, a major industrialist, also owns RAI. "One man controls the government, the media and business," says a commentator on a French program similar to RaiOt. "Can you talk about it nor not? According to Berlusconi, you cant."