The Daily Show is in a fascinating place right now, grabbing headlines and attention with splashy guest hosts and the fresh energy that they bring in a sort of audition process that keeps making a case that maybe it should never end. After all, complacency breeds indifference, and while ratings aren’t where they were in the era of Jon (Stewart) or at the high point of Trevor Noah’s run (an industry-wide situation), at least people are noticing, driven in part by this fascination with new.
This time around, the guest host is former Senator Al Franken, a veteran political satirist who was among one of the first writers on SNL nearly 50 years ago and a best-selling author (who once got sued by Fox News) and radio personality in another life before getting elected by the people of Minnesota to go to Washington. We all know what happened next. Leann Tweeden, who was performing with him on a USO tour made allegations of sexual misconduct against Franken, to which he apologized and readied for an ethics investigation. Several former colleagues came out in support of Franken, but members of his party pushed for him to resign fearing charges of hypocrisy if they didn’t come out as strong against Franken as they did with Donald Trump. Franken eventually stepped down but has said that he regretted the decision and that he should have allowed for due process to play out, saying, “Differentiating different kinds of behavior is important.” Several Senators who called for Franken’s resignation have also said, in 2019, that they regret their role in pushing him out.
A lot has happened since all of that with Franken slowly re-merging into public life as a comedian and commentator. This at a time when everything in and around Washington has gotten a lot louder and more chaotic with the pandemic, nationwide protests, a fiercely contested election, debunked charges of election fraud, the January 6th assault on the US Capital, revelations about FOX News’ role in stoking anger around those baseless charges, anxiety in the banking sector, and now a looming arrest of Trump for possible campaign finance crimes. And some of this stuff only just happened in the last two weeks.
We spoke with Franken a couple of weeks ago right after texts from Fox News personalities saw the light of day, calling bullshit on a lot of their on-air reporting around Trump’s stolen election narrative. We start the conversation there before going into the power of shows like The Daily Show to inspire change and the evolution of political satire and impact of bad actors on the cultural conversation.
Lachlan Murdoch saying that Fox News “reports without fear or favor.” Thoughts on that? Without Fear. No favor at all.
All of a sudden, no fear. Oh my God, our stock is tanking. That seemed like fear. And favor is “I’ve hated Trump forever, but we’ve got to say he’s great.” But other than that, no fear or favor.
None whatsoever. Very fair and balanced.
That’s amazing. You see, that’s what’s so funny about Fox is that you can’t get caught more red-handed, right? Which is, okay, they knew Dominion machines worked. They knew that Sidney Powell was lying. They knew that Hugo Chavez hadn’t programmed them, and Italian satellites weren’t changing Trump votes to Biden votes. They knew that, but they kept saying, “It looks like this election’s been stolen,” and they’re caught red-handed. And yet, three days later, Tucker releases this video, this edit of January 6th saying, “They were a meek and orderly crowd.”
Tourists.
And of course, they’re not covering this story at all. I wrote a book, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at The Right, 20 years ago. And it was at a time when you didn’t call people liars. It was something you just didn’t do. And because of that, in the book, I proved that they were liars very methodically and very well-documented. And they sued me. They sued me before the book came out. They hadn’t read any of the book. So they weren’t suing me because they said I was lying. It was that I used a fair and balanced look at the right, and that had been their slogan at the time, fair and balanced. And so Bill O’Reilly was the one who made them sue me because I had embarrassed him at something. But he didn’t understand that satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it.
The idea of all this coming out, these statements, the Dominion stuff, does any of it make an impact on Fox viewers and the populace as a whole in terms of the interpretation of what Fox is? Is it going to shake anybody off that tree?
That’s a really, really great question. I don’t know the answer. As I said, immediately Carlson released that video of January 6th, which is ridiculous. And just a few days after all of his texts were revealed showing that he knew that Powell was lying, I think he called her a f-ing liar and et cetera, and then continued to have her on. But even after that, he just goes right back to, “it was a meek and orderly crowd.” And so does that work for them? I think they think so.
I think they think that, okay, we’ll weather this. And usually, things like this are weathered. With Trump, anytime some scandal hit or some weird thing he said, the first one was, “I like guys who weren’t captured.” This is about McCain being a POW. I thought well, that’s the end of him. And then there’s been a million of those. “That’s the end of him.” And I have the feeling that this does not affect Fox viewers at all. In fact, I think people have gotten accustomed to, “I believe them until it turns out it wasn’t true, but even so, I’m on that side and it’s okay.”
Where does The Daily Show fit in current-day political discourse as a tool for information and showcasing hypocrisy? And what are you looking to do with your time on the show?
Well, it’s interesting that one of the challenges of doing the show is if an event happens that day, 10,000 people have written jokes about it on Twitter by the time it gets to the show.
I think well over 13 of them are good.
All you need is one.
Yeah, I guess so.
And hopefully, you’re the one who thought of it. You’re a comedian or a comedy writer, and so are the people at The Daily Show. But that makes it harder, I think, to do a show like this than it was (before Twitter). So that’s a little different, but it’s the same format, and you’re just hoping that day something interesting that you can write something funny about happens.
Outside of being funny, does the show have the ability to still have an impact on politics, the discourse? When you were in the Senate, obviously this is a different time than a few years ago, but did the movements of a show like The Daily Show (or John Oliver or Sam Bee when she was on) still ring in the halls of power?
It was interesting. John Oliver did something on net neutrality. I don’t know if you remember that, but I was a big net neutrality advocate, and he did a really good piece on it, and it made a difference, and it crashed the website at the FCC. So these things can make a difference. Now, I don’t know how many people watched The Daily Show 10 years ago. And there’s a lot of late-night comedy so, I don’t know. I can’t measure it.
Obviously, you go from the Senate back to comedy. How has that transition been? Is that reigniting a part of your brain? Is it like riding a bike?
I did comedy for so long. I started doing it in school and started working with Tom Davis; we were two of the original SNL writers. And so comedy was my first career. I was a caddy actually for a while when I was younger. But then comedy. But it’s different after you’ve left it. I’m very impressed with a lot of the young comedians and not so young comedians who really work hard and churn out a new hour every year or something like that. I thought Chris Rock’s latest concert was really great and admire that work ethic and the talent. Now, I will say this, I don’t see a lot of comedians doing standup who do bits about pharmaceutical prices and why they’re the way they are. I do. They’re expensive.
Political comedy, obviously the relationship to the kind of jokes you can tell and how fully in you can go (is different). I think about how educated the audience is also. I think this is a more educated audience now than maybe back in the ’90s and ’80s.
I’m not sure about that.
More informed, I would say. Not smarter, but there’s more information in front of them.
Well, let’s see, I was at SNL from ’75 to ’80 and from ’85 to ’95. And during that period, I wrote a lot of the political sketches and a lot of them with Jim Downey and a lot of other people. And Jim is a very, very, very thoughtful and smart conservative. And we felt that the job of the show was to do well-observed comedy that rewarded people for knowing stuff, but didn’t punish them for not knowing stuff. That was how we viewed what we were doing. And I was really very happy with what we did then, and we were very often asking the audience, not demanding that they know stuff, but rewarding the ones who did. And I felt a lot of reward for that. We got, at that time, huge ratings, but that’s when there wasn’t streaming, and there wasn’t other stuff.
Where do you stand in terms of comedians when they step over the line with the level of offense, the term cancel culture, things of that nature?
Well, I think they’re real judgments. People can get up and say things that are truly offensive, truly obnoxious. And they could be saying something that’s truly obnoxious and offensive, and they were deliberately doing that to demonstrate, obviously this is I’m showing what’s obnoxious and offensive and doing it in a way that’s clearly demonstrating that, “I’m on the side of not being.” (Laughs) You know what I mean? That’s a lot of satire. That’s a lot of dark humor. And then there are also people who just do stuff that’s offensive, and they mean it. They are inappropriate. Genuinely racist humor is not acceptable. Making fun of racist humor in a way that is clear that that’s what it’s doing, depending on who you are and it’s complicated and you can go awry, but I think there are differences.
‘The Daily Show’ with Al Franken begins its week-long run tonight at 11PM ET on Comedy Central