For Al Franken, it's finally safe to be funny again just at a moment all the news around him has taken a decidedly unfunny turn.
The two-term Minnesota senator and one-time Saturday Night Live comedian is emerging as one of the fiercest challengers of President Trump and his team, and as a rising star in a Democratic Party eager for political combat.
Albeit one who uses humor as his sword — this after spending his first term in the Senate squelching his sarcasm to prove he should be taken seriously.
Near the end of a freewheeling memoir being published by Twelve next week (sarcastically) titled Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, by Al Franken, he writes that there is "a decent chance" Trump will still be president by the time readers are perusing it.
"The book is coming out May 30, so I still think there's a very decent chance he'll still be president," Franken deadpanned to Capital Download last Thursday in his first interview about the book. Seriously: Does he think the president will serve the full four years of his term?
"I don't know," he replied. "That was kind of a joke. But it's kidding on the square."
Which is, he explained, "making a joke that you also mean."
Franken said it was "still too early" to make a judgment about whether Trump's actions could amount to obstruction of justice or other impeachable offenses. In a follow-up interview Tuesday, he noted a Washington Post report that the president had asked two top intelligence officials to push back against the FBI investigation into possible collusion by his campaign.
"It's feels like it's accelerating, and we're at a point there's a lot of there there," he said. "There's things that are ... certainly improper communications approaching stuff that may be a crime."
Perhaps it's only right that the comedian-turned-senator would become an especially effective burr in the side of the reality-TV-star-turned-president.
It was Franken who posed the question at a confirmation hearing in January for Jeff Sessions, nominated as attorney general, that prompted Sessions to volunteer he had no contact with Russians during the campaign, a statement that turned out to be untrue. Which prompted Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Which opened the door for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last week to name former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the case.
Which guarantees the sort of far-reaching, independent inquiry that the White House wanted to avoid.
"I asked him, basically, would he recuse himself ... if it turned out campaign surrogates for Trump had been coordinating with the Russians or meeting with the Russians, and he just said, 'Well, I didn't meet with the Russians,'" Franken recalled. A few weeks later, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had met twice with the Russian ambassador in 2016.
"People are like, 'That Franken, he plays three-dimensional chess; he's always several moves ahead of anyone else," Franken told USA TODAY's newsmaker series, adopting the pompous baritone voice of a pundit. That analysis gives him too much credit, he says. Sessions answered a different question than he had been asked, creating a cascade of consequences.
That said, it also was Franken who posed a policy question to Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing as Education secretary that became a cause celebre when she didn't seem to to be aware of a basic debate over how to measure student progress.
And it was Franken, along with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was said to be the most aggressive in questioning Rosenstein at a closed briefing for senators last week on the Russia inquiry.
Even at a subcommittee hearing earlier in the day viewed as pro forma by some of the senators on the dais — witness the friendly banter about the joys of fishing and the pleasures of having elk meat in your freezer — Franken peppered David Bernhardt, nominated as deputy Interior secretary, about his views on climate change.
"My job is to take the science as we find it," Bernhardt replied, an apparently scripted phrase he repeated so often that Franken began to mock it.
"I would suggest the science is in," Franken said, looking at Bernhardt expectantly, daring him to disagree.
"Would you like me to respond?" Bernhardt asked stiffly.
"That's what the long pause was for," Franken replied to laughter.
