Al FrankenWashington Post columnist Michael Kinsley scrutinizes Minnesota’s Senate race today. He chastises voters for getting hung up on Al Franken’s past jokes, rather than focusing on legitimate campaign issues:

This year a professional jokester, Al Franken (D), is challenging a professional politician, incumbent Norm Coleman (R), for a Senate seat in Minnesota. Not every joke Franken wrote or told over a third of a century in the joke business was hilarious, okay? Minnesota voters will have to decide whether their dislike of professional politicians trumps their enjoyment in taking umbrage, or vice versa. Coleman is a man of no interest, a run-of-the-mill professional politician who started out as a standard issue long-haired student rebel leader on Long Island in the 1960s and surfed the zeitgeist until now. Today he is a standard-issue pro-war tax-cut Republican. Franken, by contrast, needs no introduction and from Day One would be one of the most interesting people in the Senate.

Kinsley further points out that any comedian who hadn’t ginned up some risible material over the years wouldn’t last very long in the profession. There’s a fine line, after all, between making people laugh and causing them to squeam.

"If the voters of Minnesota would rather be represented by a hack like Norm Coleman than laugh off a few jokes that didn’t work, then they should stop complaining about being stuck with professional politicians," Kinsley concludes. "And the real joke will be on them."