In a speech to the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party convention, Al Franken apologized to convention delegates and Minnesotans for his sometimes sexually explicit humor.
"It kills me that things I said and wrote sent a message to some of my friends in this room and people in this state that they can't count on me to be a champion for women, a champion for all Minnesotans, in this campaign and in the Senate," he said. "I'm sorry for that, because that's not who I am."
To this writer, Franken's comment seems a strange thing for a satirist to say. Writing is a most unforgiving profession. A writer is what he writes — even when he writes for "Playboy." I know.
In the early '80s, my wife and I were out with a group of writer friends when a woman, a University of Minnesota law student, related a bit of graffiti scribbled in a ladies room stall. It began, "Cucumbers are better than men because ..." and continued in a way that's a bit bawdy for a family newspaper.
"That's a book!" exclaimed one of the more seasoned professionals among us.
Taking our lead from a restroom wall, seven of us hammered out scores of one-liner reasons why cucumbers are better than men. They ranged from naughty innuendo to lampoons of male peccadilloes (A cucumber never suffers from performance anxiety) and female foibles (A cucumber won't compare you to a centerfold) to pecks at changing social mores (A cucumber won't make you check into a motel as "Mrs. Cucumber").
We sent our literary effort to a number of humor publishers and received an equal number of rejections along the lines of "the girls in the office thought this was hilarious, but it's not for us at this time."
Still thinking the whole thing a lark, we were really surprised when we started receiving letters and phone calls from people around the country who had heard "cucumber jokes" over the radio. They wanted to buy the book. Apparently, "one of the girls" had photocopied our manuscript, and in an ante-Internet world faxed it to her BFFs — "best friends forever." We even discovered pillaged published copies of "The Cucumber Book" in print.
Long story short, after some legal hassling, our group recovered rights to "Why Cucumbers are Better than Men." Playboy picked up some of the lines in April of '84, and eventually two versions of the book were published — a short-lived mainstream version and a more risqué edition that sold well for more than a decade in novelty shops next to jars of body butter. It also can be found in the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collection Division Comic Art Collection.
I relate the story of "The Cucumber Book," because although its satire might send a message to some of my readers that I can't be trusted to make a case for conservative values, unlike Franken, I am not sorry for that; my past work will always be part of "who I am."
I learned a long time ago that one can approach writing in three ways:
A writer can intentionally deceive his audience. Then, what he writes may not be "who he is," but that he is willing to write deceptively is, indeed, "who he is." Is Franken apologizing for deception? For pretending to be someone he was not, writing things he did not believe so he could hold a job at "Saturday Night Live" and write for "Playboy"?
A writer can also spin the truth to create a perception irrespective of fact in order to fool his audience into agreement. Is Franken apologizing for being a con man? For trying to create the perception that laughing at rape and demeaning women makes one "sophisticated"?
But when a writer believes in his work, whether he conceptualizes his message as satire or a political speech (or an opinion page column), it becomes a permanent part of "who he is." So, if there were truly some larger idea at stake in Franken's questionable writing (a prerequisite of satire), then why does he feel the need to apologize rather than explain his message?
The 11th-century poet Omar Khayyam wrote: "The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,/Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
Franken's finger wrote, and what he wrote cannot be washed away with a mea culpa campaign speech. I don't find fault with Franken's writing porn; but as a writer I find it offensive and disappointing that as a quid pro quo for political support Franken would deny his past work and, by so doing, demean the art of satire to nothing more than scribbling on a restroom door.
Craig Westover is a contributing columnist to the Pioneer Press Opinion page and a senior policy fellow at the Minnesota Free Market Institute (www.mnfmi.org). His e-mail address is
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This article originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Friday, June 13. 2008.
