The Man Who Makes Us Laugh

Al Franken is a comedian with a message

by Robert Rorke -- Publishers Weekly, 7/18/2005

Al Franken is a humorist who sells "nutritional candy." His bestsellers, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (Delacorte cloth; Dell paper) and Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them (Dutton cloth; Plume paper), are not strictly humor books, but Franken says he can get his message across better with a laugh. "I weave humor, outrage and anger together," he says. "My books are nutritional candy. The humor is the candy part."

One of Franken's early triumphs was a book inspired by his hilarious Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smalley. The title alone made you laugh: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough and Doggone It, People Like Me (Dell). Here, too, the book was part humor, part message. "It was written in Stuart's voice, to explain 12-step programs for people who didn't know what 12-step programs were," Franken says. Inspired by his own experiences attending Al-Anon, Franken says Stuart was an "amalgam of people I'd seen at 12-step programs. One of the men there stood up and said that the higher power had put an apartment in his life. Now, you're not supposed to judge people at the meetings, but I thought this guy was an idiot. Then I realized you could learn stuff from people you thought were idiots. At first blush, Stuart seems to be an idiot."

So what books make a funny man laugh? Franken, whose next political humor book, The Truth (with Jokes) is due out from Dutton in October, admits that he doesn't read many humor books, but he has a few favorite authors, both contemporary and classic: David Sedaris, Garrison Keillor, Mark Twain and Booth Tarkington, whose Penrod books he adores.

"I love the Penrod books," Franken says. "Every once in a while, someone writes an article about them, like decades apart. They're like Leave It to Beaver at the turn of the century."