The Dangers of Humor: Al Franken

Humor is widely regarded as one of the chief ingredients of living that make it such a worthwhile experience. I have my doubts about that. Instead, when its users are careless, it seems to me that humor can be poisonous and even lethal, and that happens far too much.

Though humor is apparently his main vocation, on his weekday morning show on the Sundance Channel, the political satirist Al Franken pretty much stays on that kind of knife edge, and too often, lacking the sureness of any house cat, he loses his balance and flops over into the bubbling, corrosive stuff.

The other day at the beginning of one show, he and his sidekick, Katherine Lanpher, announced that one of their guests would be Accuro, a psychic who had a great record of predicting the winners in recent political contests. Franken appeared to be looking forward to this guest with great anticipation, but Lanpher was skeptical. She wanted to know how he arrived at his predictions, and so did I.

As the hour went on, however, it was a long time before Accuro arrived, and meanwhile Franken showed every sign of becoming increasingly annoyed at a male staffer who seemed indifferent to his boss's concern, and especially at a female staffer, who was summoned to explain in person the psychic's absence. And when Accuro finally did show up, his responses were limited to fending off Lanpher's attacks on his credibility and to Franken's disgust at the psychic's inability to find the building, despite the fact that he was supposedly an infallible knower of the usually unknowable.

It all turned to be a big hoax on the part of Franken and his cohorts.

The next day Franken read a long email from someone who roundly and properly attacked him, though not for having perpetrated the hoax. The writer was clearly still unaware of that, apparently having listened on radio instead of viewing on TV and so hadn't had the advantage that I had had of seeing the scripts they had used. Instead the emailer criticized Franken's bad behavior toward his underlings.

GW Bush is often hit, I assume even by Franken himself, for not having one apologetic molecule in his body. But I wouldn't be surprised if Franken feels that he, too, is blessed with the same infallibility. Neither he nor the normally much more balanced Lanpher were the least bit contrite for the nasty trick that they had played on their audience. Instead they seemed to assume that everyone had been in on the "joke," and they took the email to be actually a testament to their superior acting powers, and so they had nothing but scorn for those who, like me, took their dishonesty to be good gold.

But it's just that kind of trust that I would think that, on a show like theirs, where they are trying to erect a strong structure consisting of certain points of view, usually liberal, they would always be trying to build up, rather than risking it in favor of showing how clever they can be.

In his ceaseless desire to be funny, Franken falls into this trap much more often than does Lanpher, and so he isn't nearly as trustworthy. For instance he likes to present the points of view of adversaries like the Russ guy with a completely straight face and tongue firmly in cheek, and we are supposed to know that those viewpoints are so absurd that they can't be seen in any other way.

But I wonder how many of Franken's viewers and listeners know that. And why should they have to spend so much of their time and effort in sorting out the fool's gold from the good gold on his show?