Frankenstein is Baaaack!

 “AL Franken at the Acme Comedy Club,” Minneapolis, 8/20/2022

Al Franken gave a PHD seminar on jokes to a small, packed house in Minneapolis’ former warehouse district.  Of course this is Minnesota, where sobriety reigns supreme and jokes sometime go under or over the radar.  Yet the house mostly rocked.  He was preceded by two comics, one who enjoyed looting Target© during the George Floyd uprising and a woman who had rejected Islam as a recovering Muslim, allegedly voting for Trump to keep her fundamentalist Pakistani father out of the U.S.  Her understated delivery and sly punchlines were superb.   

Franken was up next.  His storied career out of St. Jewish Park, an inner suburb of Minneapolis, covered Franken & Davis, who formed at upscale Blake high school.  Then he worked at Brave New Workshop, a long-running sketch comedy club in Minneapolis; a long run at SNL as a writer and cast member; and the U.S. Senate, a place perhaps more idiotic than even a comedy club.

Franken opened with his Jimmy Kimmel line:  “So who’s here from out-of-state to get an abortion?”  He took pokes at Diane Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, some members of the cloak-room Democratic caucus, along with Ted Cruz, revealing how these geniuses of public policy are anything but.  One of his classic jokes was this that passed under the heads of the cloak-room crowd:  “What is the last thing you want to hear after you’ve blown Willie Nelson?”  Pause.  “That wasn’t Willie Nelson.” He told a story of how Cruz – a fellow Harvard Grad - lied to his face.  As he said of Cruz …. “When people think of a cruise that is full of shit, you think of Carnival©, but we in the Senate think of Ted.” After his probing questions as a member of the Judicial Committee, he quoted Diane Feinstein as to how she thought all comedians were stupid.  He recounted an exchange with Grassley that revealed a deep country bumpkin who was missing a few cylinders.  Even Bernie Sanders came in for a poke for having to change his stump speech by removing 'millionaires,' as Bernie is worth more than $1M now.  Though actually he still invokes millionaires, as most of them are the base for the billionaires.  If he becomes a billionaire, his whole speech is ruined.

Franken also reamed the local and national press, which was more concerned with whether he had ever done cocaine at SNL or advocated incest.  He told of his ‘disappointment’ with the Democratic Party leadership, which had told him to resign after a cracked ‘me-too’ fatwa led by Kirsten Gillibrand, loser presidential candidate.  Franken folded on advice of the Democratic Party honchos instead of asking his own constituents if they wanted him to resign.  

As someone who was inspired into politics by the assassination of Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone he failed to defy the Democratic leadership and went meekly into the weeds.  Much evidence points to Wellstone’s plane going down by way of the FBI under orders of Cheney, using an electro-magnetic pulse weapon on the small plane the family was in.  Wellstone had defied the government line and even his Democratic colleagues on many issues, including the Iraq War.  I guess Franken didn’t want to eventually die too under a drone missile launched by Chuck Schumer.

All of this circled around the nature of a joke.  He tells a story of being required as Senator to send a congratulatory letter to a 110 year old lady in Minnesota.  He wrote “May your future be bright” or some such thing. His staff went bonkers. He did 'borsch-belt' Buddy Hackett jokes, and made fun of the Democratic Party consultants who couldn't 'stick' an idea or a joke for the life of them.  He wore a CoVid mask while handling a ventriloquist dummy that coughed and spewed all over the front row.  Of course you couldn’t see his lips move due to the mask because he can’t throw his voice anyway.  

Whatever you think of his servile approach to the Democratic Party, Franken is still an acute observer and funnyman.  At the end Franken advocated everyone door knock and phone bank for Democrats to protect “our democracy.”  It was an unintentional laugh line and brought quiet to the room. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "American Assassination - The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone," “The End of Free Speech for Seth Rogan, Sony Pictures and America!” “Multi-Millionaire Comedians Who Love the System,” “Get Out” (Peele); “The Chapo Guide to Revolution,” “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” (Camp); “The White Lotus,” “The Jesus Comics,” “Religulous” (Maher); “What Can You Say About Bill Maher?”

The Cultural Marxist

August 22, 2022