AL FRANKEN '73 smiles for the crowd as he signs copies of his new book at First Parish Church last Monday.

When Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG) invited comedian and political satirist Al Franken ’73 to be a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy last spring, Franken was surprisingly unmoved.

“I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow’s leaders,” Franken writes in his new best-selling book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. “Unless it was spending fireside evenings sipping sherry with great minds at the Faculty Club. Yawn.”

But in spite of Franken’s witty jabs at Harvard’s so-called prestige, he arrived in Cambridge last January eager to explain to 14 students in his hand-picked KSG study group that they were going to help research his next book, which would reveal hidden conservative biases in the media.

Franken says this collaborative effort produced a volume full of facts, detailed research and humor that has paid off: the book has been number one on the New York Times’ non-fiction best-seller list five weeks in a row. But the book also brought Franken together with an enthusiastic group of students who would soon bond over their political passions and home-cooked meals from Franken’s wife.

This family-style group of dynamic liberal politicos called themselves TeamFranken.

The Making of TeamFranken

The KSG first asked Franken to be a fellow three years ago, but he declined so that he could stay at home in New York City with his son, then a sophomore in high school. But he promised to come to Harvard when his son was a high school senior, and so last year, he says, his time was up.

He says he called the KSG to ask what it meant to be a fellow, and Harvard told him he was supposed to “be a resource.”

“So I thought about it and I was beginning to get mad at [President] Bush again,” Franken says. “So I’ll write a book. They said, ‘You can have a study group.’ [I asked] ‘What can I teach them? To research my book?’ They said ‘Sure.’”

So Franken spread the word around campus through e-mail lists and KSG announcements that he was running a study group.

TeamFranken member Stephen Rabin, a KSG student, says he was astonished that Franken was coming to Harvard.

“They nonchalantly announced the list of fellows and I’m scanning the list and I see Al Franken,” Rabins says. “My eyes popped out of my head.”

Franken received applications from 90 students detailing why they wanted to be in his study group.

“I wanted people who were political and I interviewed them to see if they had a sense of humor,” Franken says.

But he says that he warned the students not to be too humorous in their application.