'I'd like to see something like that in The Crimson,' he said. Something was rotten on the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center.įinally, Franken's stoic expression collapsed and he broke into laughter. 'Stupid trick,' Curtain shouted as she poked the coin at the rubber.

He walked over to Curtain's desk and pressed the top of the quarter, which fell magically to the desk, and the writer walked away giggling, leaving Curtain to try to find a nonexistent hole in the glove. The coin stuck to the underside of the glove, but the rubber was so thin that the quarter appeared to be sitting upon it. The writer had taken a surgical glove and stretched it tightly across the top of a quarter. And that chair Franken was sitting in-that was the chair he is paid to sit in and make jokes.Ī few yards away, another writer was playing a joke on Jane Curtain, an attractive 'Saturday Night' actress. Franken was sitting in his writing office for 'NBC's Saturday Night,' a new, New York-based television comedy show. His round, plump face certainly looked sincere, and with the aura of innocence radiating from his big, thick glasses and curly hair, who would have doubted him? He was, after all, a 1973 Harvard alumnus himself, so he should have known something about the value of his Psych and Soc Rel degree.īut something wasn't quite right. It was hard to tell whether Franken was serious or not. 'My advice to Harvard students,' Al Franken said soberly, 'is to drop out.'

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