You could see both the promise and the risk of Franken's comic background when he did his friend Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" one Saturday night early in April. Keillor is one of those who originally asked Franken to consider entering politics. At the New York studio broadcast, Franken did a long, moving monologue about his working-class dad. "My dad loved comedians, especially George Jessel, and he loved Henny Youngman and Buddy Hackett," Franken says. "We're Jewish, OK?" The crowd is cracking up.

Later in Franken's life, he met Hackett. And to the audience he explains: "The first thing he did was tell me a joke and it's my favorite joke, so I'm just going to tell it. This is it, Buddy Hackett joke: A guy goes into a doctor's office; he's got a dot on his forehead. The doctor says, 'Oh my God, I've never seen it before but I read about it in medical school.' The guy says, 'Well, doctor, what is it?' 'Well, in six weeks you are going to have a penis growing out of your forehead.' The guy says, 'Well, doc, cut it off.' [The doctor replies] 'I can't cut it off; it's attached to your brain, you'd die.' So the guy says: 'So, doctor, what you're telling me, is that in six weeks, every morning when I wake up and look in the mirror, I'm going to see a penis growing out of my forehead?' And the doctor says, 'Ah, no, no, no, no. You won't see it. The balls will cover your eyes.'"

Listening on the radio was Tom Taylor of the broadcast trade magazine Inside Radio. Though the audience burst into laughter, Taylor complained that the joke was inappropriate "in that context" because "it is a gather around radio in the living room family show." You can just imagine stuffy GOP operatives huffing about Franken making penis jokes on the beloved "Prairie Home Companion." And yet Franken's wry humor usually wins people over. Later in his "Prairie Home Companion" monologue, it lightened a poignant story about Franken's father's last days. A rabbi requested to visit his father as he lay on his deathbed, Franken told the audience. "I go into the bedroom where he is," Franken tells it. "[My dad's] very weak. It's five days before he died. So [my father's] laying there and I say, 'The rabbi, Rabbi Black, is here and he wants to talk to you.' (Franken shifts to an old Yiddish voice and imitates his father.) "'I don't really know him, but if [the rabbi] feels it'll do him some good.'" The crowd loved it.

"I suspect some people will tell him he has to curb a little bit the tendency to crack wise and that might be difficult to do, but then again you listen to the show and he tries fairly hard to not just do jokes," says Minnesota Democrat Wy Spano. "He tries pretty hard to get into substance and the people in the party know that.

"He can get back to Minnesota-value talk very quickly," Spano continues. "I've seen him perform and been in conversations with him. He doesn't sound all that much like a New Yorker to us and the Minnesota values piece is mostly what he talks about, and I think he probably spends some time making sure that rhetoric is good by checking in with a lot of people around here."

The challenge for Franken, Spano believes, is to appreciate Minnesota's very personal brand of politics. "It's a very tricky job, but [Al Franken] has to be respectful of and nice to all those folks who make up the Democratic Party, the hundred some on the state central committee and the thousands who go to precinct caucuses, all of those that have a little bit of power. He has to be respectful and nice to the folks, but he can't appear to the party to be pandering to them."

Franken's convinced he can do it. He knows his detractors will say he is a joke, a liberal elitist. But he insists, in the end, he'll win over Minnesotans.

"How is Al Franken an elitist compared to George W. Bush?" Franken asks rhetorically. "I grew up in a house that was built in the early '50s that we bought for $19,000 or $11,000," he recalls. "My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time. I don't think we ever had a year where my parents made more than $15,000, but I never felt that I wanted for anything, because I got three squares, could watch as much TV as I wanted, and could go outside and play."

Today, Franken reaches back to his youth to find his home. He speaks of his time in New York as if he is an expatriate. Like fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald, can he really be both New York and Minnesota at the same time? Well, he'll try. And while he has not lived a Minnesota winter for three decades, Franken insists that he feels "more in tune with the majority of the people in Minnesota" than anywhere else. "It's weird, I'm so traditional," he continues. "I've been married 29 years. I arranged my career so I could always be home. Anybody who knows me knows that I live out my beliefs."

"It takes a while to understand what is the appeal of Al Franken because he's not the greatest comedian who ever lived, he's certainly not the greatest talk-show host who ever lived, and he hasn't proven himself yet as a politician," says Michael Harrison, the publisher of the radio trade publication Talkers. "So why Al Franken? That's because, as best I can analyze it, Al Franken is larger than the sum of his parts. There is something about the guy that has credibility." And credibility will be important to Minnesotans. "Early in the campaign, I had my doubts that I could beat Coleman because he was so smooth and I felt I could never be as smooth as him," Ventura says. "And then it dawned on me about five minutes later that I wanted to be just the opposite of him, that I wanted to be rough around the edges, that I didn't want to be so polished."

Certainly, in a time where action star Arnold Schwarzenegger serves as the governor of the most populous U.S. state, Franken's candidacy doesn't seem far-fetched. He has, after all, already helped put Air America on a talk-radio map that's bright red. At the time of the network's launch, of the 15 top political talk-radio shows, 10 were conservative and none were liberal, according to Talkers magazine. Though still dwarfed by his counterparts on the right of radio, Franken has grown from more than 700,000 weekly listeners last spring, to 1.5 million weekly listeners today, not including his recent expansion to Los Angeles, Dallas or Washington, D.C. Still, Rush Limbaugh earns 20 million listeners weekly; Sean Hannity, 12 million. Yet, because of Franken's radio persona, he is arguably the most widely known liberal commentator.

Though he has written five books, including two New York Times No. 1 bestsellers, Franken has radio to thank for his newfound stature. He has beaten back the skeptics. "You could argue that conservative talk lends itself more to talk radio because it speaks in short, easy-to-grasp ideas: lower taxes, less government, and you get off in the Terri Schiavo case, and you get culture of life," says Taylor, of Inside Radio. "These are easier concepts to talk about than a lot of progressive ideas. You know the famous Bush thing, 'I don't do nuance'; progressive talkers do nuance and it tends to slow them down."

Franken does nuance. Unlike many on the political left, he does not support a set troop withdrawal date in Iraq. He would have voted for NAFTA. But bring up healthcare, and the lefty wonk in Franken comes out. "The more I do this show, the more I realize that healthcare is a huge issue," Franken says. "We were just talking about the bankruptcy study and Elizabeth Warren from Harvard did this study and 50 percent of bankruptcy is because of some kind of medical problem and most of that is because we don't have universal healthcare and then you look at reservists returning from Iraq and they don't have healthcare." He says he is not a pure party loyalist. "There are a lot of problems I have with the Democratic Party. That 18 Democrats voted for that bankruptcy bill, that says a lot. That should have been a bill where we said no."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Back in the Air America studio, "The Al Franken Show" is on an advertising break. Franken and his co-host, Katherine Lanpher, are on a tirade. They're livid with the credit card industry.

Lanpher: "I think Big Credit is just as guilty as Big Tobacco."

Franken: "It's predatory lending."

They say credit-card companies coerce Americans into debt and are now lobbying Congress to force Americans to pay that debt through new legislation that makes it significantly harder to declare bankruptcy. Their new guest, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, argues that this results in Americans essentially becoming creditors' indentured servants. He squarely blames the Republican-controlled Congress for serving the credit-card industry instead of their constituents, pointing out that usury, the lending of money at interest, is forbidden in the Bible. "If you could just get those Republicans to follow the Bible," Franken quips.

That's the paradox of Al Franken. At his core, he remains a comedian. Yet the more he involves himself in politics, the less he wants to be seen as a joke.

"I'm a genuine person. Well, that's easy for me to say," he adds with a chuckle. "I really believe that and I think people will respond to that. Of course they are going to go after me in all kinds of ways, but I'm also a fighter."

Is that what we witnessed with the Dean heckler in New Hampshire?

Franken takes the opportunity to clear up the record.

"I did not body slam him," Franken responds. "The guy made a break for the podium, so I grabbed his legs," he adds, as he squats down and shows how he pinned the heckler. "I wasn't a great wrestler."

But you chose to get on the mat?

"Well, I'm not afraid of anybody."

Including Norm Coleman?

Franken scoffs, "Oh, God, no."

Recent Stories