Lorne Michaels

So, if you live in the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area, you will have been forced to sit through this ad more times than you can count. 

Continuing with the theme that Al Franken is a big, fat, stupid, idiot, unsuited in temperament to become a United States Senator, I did a little research today.  A while back, Dearest Jonathan directed me toward Tom Shales and James Davis' excellent Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, As Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests,   Jonathan said there were some excellent "Coked Up Al" stories in there, so, of course, I went and looked it up. 

On drugs...

Dick Ebersol:  My office was on the fourth floor.  The writers basically never got there before one o'clock in the afternoon---ever.  We had so little space.{...} Al {Franken} and Tom {Davis} had bought their first-ever cocaine, and they had it all out on the desk.  First time they were ever able to buy any.  As apprentice writers, their pay was, I think, $325 a week.  So they have the cocaine on the desk, they're like literally staring at it.  I'm off in the distance.  I'm in a tough place because I'm supposedly the executive, but I decided it wasn't my job to play policeman.

Suddenly this figure comes roaring through the room.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a straw in his hand.  He gets to the table, and he has half of that stuff up his nose by the time they knew who it was: Belushi.  They didn't know whether to be thrilled that Belushi had just done this to their coke or be absolutely decimated, because that represented about half the money they had in the world at that time. {...}

Of course, when this book was published in 2003, Al already had his political aspirations in mind...

Al Franken: Yes, there were some people on the show doing coke.  I don't like to get into this.  John died of it.  He had a problem, he got addicted.  We didn't know about that, we didn't know at the time.  When I say "we" I mean Americans didn't know what cocaine did, and about addiction and that kind of thing.

But then Shales must have slipped him a scotch, because, as it turns out, Al decided there was more to say on the subject...

Al Franken:  There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises.  Yeah, a number of people got in trouble.  But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up.  There was a very undisicplined was of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday.  We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have.  And so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff.

People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, "No, there was no coke.  It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs."  And that was just a funny le that I liked to tell.  Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was impossibel to do the show without the drugs.  Comedians and comdey writers and people in show business in general aren't the most disciplined people, so the idea of putting the writing off until you had to, then staying up all night, was an attractive one.  And then having this drug that kept you awake in an enjoyable way was kind of tempting, too.  But I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine.  That was the only reason I did it.  Heh-heh.

Maybe his next ad should go something like, "Al Franken: The guy you can absolutely trust to make sure if you OD, he'll dump your  body at the ER door sometime before your heart explodes." 

Such a selfless guy, that Al.  Makes you want to go right out and vote for him, doesn't it? 

But, of course, with Al being a political creature going way back, there are a few tales to tell concerning poltical figures of the mid-70's...

Tom Davis: One day Henry Kissinger calls up, and the call is picked up at an NBC page's desk.  And the page goes, "Henry Kissinger's on the phone.  He wants tickets for his son."  And Al grabs the phone and yells into it, "You know, if it hadn't been for the Christmas bombing in Cambodia, you could've had your fucking tickets!'"

I'm sure Henry---"I ordered extra bombing of Hanoi to get the damn North Vietnamese to the table at the Paris Peace Accords"---Kissinger felt rightly chastised by not receiving SNL tickets. 

And then we have what I'm sure Al calls, "The Ambush of Spiro Agnew"

Al Franken:  I had heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder's show, so I just wanted to meet him and harass him a little bit.  I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six.  Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, "You called student protesters bums, and aren't you the bum?---I think that's what I said---"because you took money?"  And he just said, "I never called them bums.  That was Nixon."  It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it.

I thought I'd pressed the button to start the tape recorder, but I didn't.  I'd had it on and turned it off or something.  So I didn't get it on tape.  And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students bums.  At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a bum.

And then the producer of the Snyder show called me up and said, "Don't do that.  If there's somebody on our show that you hate, don't come down here and harass them.  That's not good for our show."

I'll let Lorne Michaels comment on this one...

Lorne Michaels:  When Al went down to the fucking sixth floor to berate Spiro Agnew, Chevy and O'Donoghue and I were like, "Al, what the fuck are you doing?"  Al took that "nattering nabob" speech personally.  He was probably twenty-three when the show started, I was thirty.  It has always seemed to me that people who make the most noise about artistic integrity were the first people to buy a Mercedes, and the more people railed about things, when you examine their lives twenty-five years later----well, you know. 

{my emphasis}

Yes, Lorne, sadly, we here in Minnesota know.  And we will keep on knowing until Coked Up Al loses to Norm Coleman in November.