Name: Becoming A Senator w/ Al Franken | You Made It Weird
Uploaded: 2022-10-25T17:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Becoming A Senator w/ Al Franken | You Made It Weird' from Pete Holmes on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Becoming A Senator w/ Al Franken | You Made It Weird' from Pete Holmes on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-25. Transcript available.

do you remember the moment when you were like i think i'm going to go for this
like i'm going to
try and become a senator oh senate um yeah i do remember the time i thought
about doing it and
um paul wellstone was um senator from minnesota he got elected in um
in uh 92 and an upset victory and he was a great progressive uh senator and he's
a friend of mine
and 2002 he was running for re-election and he was in a dead heat with norm
coleman
and he had to vote in october on the iraq war and he was going to vote against
it and the large
majority of minnesotans were for going to war and paul told me this is probably
going to be the end of
my career because he was in a neck and neck race and he voted against it and
the next poll that came out
had him up by seven oh wow it went the other way because it went the other way
because minnesotans
respect a politician who votes his conscience and his plane went down and with
paul and his wife and his
daughter and three aides and two pilots died and coleman ended up winning the
race and three months
after norman coleman got into office he did a interview with roll call which is
a capitol hill
newspaper and he said to be blunt i'm a 99 improvement over paul wallstone
and i said who the is going to beat this guy so that's very west wing i don't
mean to make light
of this person who died or anything but when it gets personal like that there's
a west wing moment
where someone puts down martin sheen someone who died it's almost it might have
been inspired by this
for all i know and he was like well guess what game on like now it's personal
sort of thing yeah it lit
a fire under yeah and that's not a reason to run for the senate i guess but uh
i moved back to minnesota
and um i in 2006 i just campaigned for democrats who were running in the state
and i found that crowds
would turn out for me and so i decided to go for it because of comedy i think
because of comedy i've
also written these books like russia limbaugh's a big fat idiot and other
observations which was
i've written four number one new york times bestsellers wow not to brag about
my four what do you pull
down for the number one huh what do you pull down for those those are there it's
it's good it's good
lies and lying liars is the biggest and that uh that was about fox and fox sued
me oh wow thank you
so my my wife wanted to get a band a marching band to go in front of fox going
thank you very much
boom thank you very much why is this thing that any i mean it was amazing
because it put so much
attention there everyone had to read yeah and they were laughed out of court
they they the name the
title of the book was lies and lying liars who tell them a fair and balanced
look at the right and so they
sued me for copyright or tried to stop the book from being published because of
quote copyright
fair and balanced fair and balanced and the thing is is that the case law is
clear that if you're if
the thing if the title is is something you're actually writing about it's fine
so right they were just
laughed out of court and but o'reilly was so mad at me for i had made i made
him really look bad at a
book expo and that he insisted they sue and it was it was an o'reilly sue they
had to do it they had to
please please him yeah and i'm uh floyd abrams who was number one you know uh
first amendment lawyer
in the country took my case he'd done pentagon papers and all that kind of
stuff
and he calls me up he told me not to go to court you know for it and he said we
won i said floyd a
chimp could have won this and later there was a documentary made about the case
and he wrote and he was
interviewed he said a monkey could have won this and i call him up i go i didn't
say monkey i said chimp
and he said what's the difference i go well chimp is funny monkey isn't
chimp a chimp even mail chimp which is a sponsor is funny i'm just kidding they're
not a sponsor
yeah chimp is funnier also close and he testified once in front of the uh i was
on the judiciary committee
okay i wasn't i'm not a lawyer but i played one in a sketch that's what i like
to say and uh floyd was
testifying and i just made him have to i told that story i made him you got it
right on the record
i got it on the record it's in the congressional record and he misquoted me so
you decide to go for
it for this beautiful reason you get sued for your books that you made a lot of
money for
then you run and i it was a very very close race 312 votes i clobbered him it
was the
narrowest clobbering in history you clobbered him by 312 roughly an ihop like a
full ihop it was this
recount we had i actually won the recount in time to be seated with my
colleagues but the republicans
went to court and uh delayed me like six months but when i got there as a 60th
democratic vote and i was
60th democratic senator so that's how we got the affordable care act and did
you i don't care for
that act did you just kidding did you uh thank god we got that damn thing i'm
glad yeah did you have
any imposter syndrome i mean people have imposter syndrome for less for some
reason i didn't and for
i think it was basically that i knew why i was doing it and uh it was it ceased
to be you know revenge or
something but i knew why i was doing i was doing it for all the right reasons
it's similar to your
very pure and to me sometimes challenging just love of comedy like you just
wanted to do comedy
because you just want to laugh and you just want to do what makes you laugh and
make people laugh that's
that's a very pure intent yeah but i really kind of think that's any good
comedian that's that's what
right yeah and i'm not sure that every politician i went it goes into it for
the same reasons i hear
you i went in i'm challenged by that just because i know when i'm off access it's
because i'm doing
comedy because it makes me high and when i'm on access i'm and feeling good and
i'm in the flow and
doing good work to be honest it's because i'm going on stage because i want to
make everybody laugh not
for the feeling you get from making people laugh does that make sense i see i
see that makes a lot
of sense but when i i'm with you i got into this because i want to do what
makes me laugh but then
it gets very tempting to get it's the ring of power tolkien's ring of power now
you're like oh this gets
me this gets me off yeah then that can become your new reason to do it yeah and
my wife has to
recalibrate me every once in a while and she's like okay you didn't like it but
didn't you do your job
didn't you make them laugh like you're like it's not really about you being
like i'm a golden boy
you know what i mean which clearly is my wound not yours i'm sorry you have to
live that way
i did put that on you in a strange moment and what a great response
Bye.