l Franken knows how to pick a fight. Fresh off of a respectable stint on “Saturday Night Live,” he published 1999’s “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,” using the tone of his nemesis to lash out at all things conservative and/or factually inaccurate.

This year finds Franken treading on Limbaugh’s home turf with the Air America radio screed “The Al Franken Show,” which kicked off a national tour at Mandeville Auditorium on Sept. 30. In between prepping Meg Ryan for a part in his radio play about Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as a werewolf (in which Wolfowitz eats the face of Vice President Dick Cheney) and culling through news articles for “terrible lies,” Franken had a few words for the Guardian.

Guardian: Most UCSD students know of your fame from the reruns of “Saturday Night Live” as the empowering Stuart Smalley. So how’d you make the decision to become a hard-core pundit, coming from the mainstream of “Saturday Night Live”?

Franken: On “SNL” we did a lot of political satire. I did 15 seasons on the show, and I’m very proud of the body of work that we did. [Former SNL writer] Jim [Miller] particularly was quite conservative, and we didn’t feel it was fair to the other people on the show to be writing our own political views. So, the ethic of that show was to make fun of everybody, and to do so equally.

When I left the show finally in ’95, I had a full contract to write about politics and to write what I wanted to write, [and] my name would be on the book! So that’s when I started seriously getting into political punditry, although it’s always been satire.

G: In terms of political satire, it seems like the kind of mockery that you’ve been promoting on your show …

F: Scorn and ridicule!

G: Well, with you and Jon Stewart and Michael Moore, it seems like this scorn and ridicule is what’s getting through to voters. Why?

F: Well, I think what a lot of the campaigns do these days — I think it’s both sides, but more the Republican side — is that they treat people like idiots. I think it’s like the lowest common denominator kind of campaigning. And I think that Jon does a great job, and that Michael and I try to give people a little bit of credit.

G: For your last book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” you had a crack research team of college students from the Harvard political school. What are your impressions of college students as political activists?

F: We had some extremely impressive people in our group. A lot of them are in [political] campaigns right now, so I’m very lucky. It’s very inspiring to work with these men and women.

G: For a lot of college students, political activism seems to drop off when they get a “legitimate” job. Any advice to keep us in the fray?

F: Well, there’s a couple ways to do it. One is to get a legitimate job in activism, and those exist! I mean, one of the things the right wing has done is create a career path for the Right. You know, good, paying, exciting jobs like running the reconstruction effort in Iraq, without knowing anything about [reconstruction]. These kids are Republican operatives in their 20s who really have no experience, and whose only thing in common was having filed their resumes on the Heritage Foundation’s Web site. They had a 21-year-old who was in charge of domestic spending for security in Iraq. When asked what his last favorite job was, he said driving an ice cream truck!

G: So what do you say to those who drop the ball and don’t get involved while the conservatives already have their career path running?

F: It’s your country. It’s going to be your kids’ country. You have to take some responsibility. There’s a job you have as a citizen, and that means being informed.

G: What would you say to a voter who was planning on voting for Bush, who thinks he’s a nice guy, that kind of thing?

F: Well, I have a different measure of the man. I’m Jewish, but from what I understand about Jesus’ message, a good part of it was about how you should be judged by how you treat the least among us.

The O’Franken Factor Factor, a collection of radio segments from “The Al Franken Show,” was released on Sept. 21.