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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Al Franken talks about his big victory over the Fox News bullies, why Bush can be thrown out in 2004, and comedy as a political weapon.
Aug 27, 2003 | Al Franken got the glad tidings while vacationing in Italy. He had fallen asleep reading "The Tipping Point" and mulling marketing ideas for his forthcoming "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," when a friend staying in the villa walked into his bedroom and woke him up. "Al!" he said. "You're being sued by Fox!" After a second-and-a-half of considering this, Franken responded: "Good!" Then he fell back asleep.
If Fox's intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken's pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its trademark-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced") out of court -- even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken's book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon's list Thursday.
All of which must have been bitter wormwood for the popular Fox talk-show host Bill O'Reilly, who many speculated was the moving force behind the now-dropped lawsuit after his notorious May 31 exchange with Franken at the Los Angeles Book Expo. Under Franken's tender ministrations, O'Reilly was reduced to sputtering "shut up!" and demanding that the gadfly comedian and writer remove O'Reilly's "splotchy" face off the cover of Franken's upcoming book.
For the man the Fox complaint called "shrill and unstable" and (somewhat unnecessarily, considering that charge) "not a well-respected voice in American politics," it was all in a day's work. Franken, who created the famously insipid Stuart Smalley character during his 15-year tenure at "Saturday Night Live" and has written four books, says driving conservatives off the deep end is easy. "O'Reilly keeps saying I'm a smear artist," he says, "but all I do is just say what they said...It's jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad."
His most recent prank even got the attention of John Ashcroft. Writing on the letterhead of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, where he was a fellow, Franken sent notes to 27 senior Bush administration officials, including the U.S. Attorney General himself, asking each to "share a moment when you were tempted to have sex but were able to overcome your urges." The stories would be used, he told them, in a book about public school abstinence programs called "Savin' It!"
On Tuesday, Salon talked to Franken about his reaction to the judge's ruling. Speaking by cell phone from a New York airport, Franken talked about being "a cute, cuddly kind of deranged" and the need for liberal talk radio, before sending the interviewer through the luggage X-ray machine.
What was your first reaction upon hearing about the suit? Were you surprised?
I was surprised because they had first threatened to sue about two weeks after the Book Expo dust-up with what's his name, and then they didn't do anything, and the News Corp. [which owns Fox] owns Harper Collins, so they know how books work. So they waited until they knew we were printing books. That surprised me, because on the one hand that seems like a smart thing to do, because that punishes us and in a way they prevail, but it hurts their case, because that's just sitting on your hands. Especially if you're trying to get a preliminary injunction, you can't do that.
So I was surprised, but I was also very pleased. I was in Italy, and I'd brought the book "The Tipping Point" to maybe give me a new perspective on how to promote my book. But I put off reading it for about five or six days because I didn't want to think about my book for at least five or six days. So then I took "The Tipping Point" to bed and started reading it and it's a great book and about halfway through I start to fall asleep, and I start saying to myself: "Must think of ... tipping point ... for book ... must ... think of ..." and then fell asleep. And my next conscious moment someone in the house walked in my room and said, "Al? You're being sued by Fox." And it took me about a second and a half, and I looked at them and I said, "Good!" and then I went back to sleep. And then I got up a couple of hours later -- I was doing a lot of sleeping in Italy, because I'd really been in a rush to get the book done and it was very hard -- and I went on my e-mail and started reading, and all Team Franken was e-mailing the complaint that I was, let's see, unstable, shrill and unstable ...
