Whether the book is funny, or entertaining is another question, and one that's much more up to personal opinion. I thought it did a good job in its main goals though, which were to show that the right wing media and public personalities lie more than their left wing counterparts. The book also addresses media bias, and which I don't think it says much about whether the media on a whole is biased towards the left wing or right wing, it does show very clearly that the mainstream media is much more likely to report lies and slanders about left wing celebrities than right wing ones. There are innumerable examples of this presented, most prominently ones comparing the media coverage of Al Gore and George Bush during the 2000 election campaign.

To the scores.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/4
Interesting Anecdotes: 7
Sufficient Detail: 6
Humor: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 6.5

I've heard of Al Franken for years, but I've never seen him on TV, or heard him in concert, or read any of his books, other than flipping through a few pages of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot in the bookstore. As such, reading Lies... was about 96% of my lifetime exposure to Al Franken. I say this just so you realize I didn't have any firm opinion of him going in. Obviously we tend to agree on ideology, but I had no idea what his humor was like, how he made his points, etc. My take on this book: It was an enjoyable read, but I did not find the book very funny or entertaining, and I skipped over about a quarter of the chapters and all of the longer comedy pieces like the "Supply Side Jesus" cartoon, the war story parody, etc. Other readers might enjoy those the most, and looking at the Amazon.com reviews (there are almost 3000 reviews, with a 4-star average), it seems like most people found the book a lot funnier than I did.

The book has a lot of chapters and covers a lot of material, and to me it was like reading several dozen long and well-written blog entries on the subjects. Lots of them are investigative expose type entries; Al examines and lampoons some of the laziest and dumbest lies in the latest books by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and other right wing authors, Al takes the piss out of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly by quoting some of their most common techniques and showing how full of deception they are, and so on.  These chapters are informative if you don't know the facts going in, and were meant to be funny. I chuckled a few times, but the sheer amount of lying and deception going on keeps me from really enjoying it that much. It's like seeing someone who claims to be an animal lover exposed for secretly drowning kittens in their bathtub; yeah it's nice to see them exposed as a fraud and a bastard, but no matter how the exposure is revealed... what's funny about drowning kittens in a bathtub?

Sure, it's funny that Ann Coulter makes stupid mistakes and doesn't bother to correct them. She claims that the NY Times is so elitist they didn't even post an obit for dead NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart for several days after his death -- and Franken includes a copy of the front page of the NYT from the day after Earnhart's death with a large article about his passing... right there on the front page. Even more ridiculous, in her book Slander Coulter pillories Evan Thomas, bureau chief of Newsweek, with the damning fact that his father ran for US President 4 times while he was a member of the American Socialist Party. Of course, as Franken points out in Lies..., Norm Thomas isn't Evan Thomas' his father, they've never met, and incidentally, Norm actually ran for president 6 times. True, neither of these errors are major points in Coulter's book, (though the dozens more lies/errors Franken points out in a short chapter on her might be), but if she's lying/erring about things as absurdly-easy to verify as what was on the front page of the NYTimes the day after Dale Earnhart died, or the name/identity of a public figure's father, you have to wonder if anything she says is true.

Does she fact check at all, other than to find things to misrepresent by taking them out of context? And yes, Ann Coulter is one of the most loathsome human beings alive today, and her argumentative techniques could not be more deceitful or dishonest... but I just get sort of depressed by seeing a long reminder of that fact. Any laughs I might manage would be of outrage or disgust, and reading hundreds of pages of that sort of thing tends to depress, rather than amuse me.

In addition to exposing lies from the self-proclaimed right wing, Franken spends a lot of time comparing the media coverage of gaffes/lies/errors by Democratic and Republican politicians. He doesn't carry out an extensive analysis, since that would require thousands of pages and be well beyond the scope of his book, but he does run some fast checks on the 2000 election, comparing the coverage of Bush and Gore, and as least judging by the facts Franken presents, the SCLM (So Called Liberal Media) was far, far more critical of Gore's errors and/or lies than they were of Bush's. The famous alleged Gore quote, that he "invented the Internet." is easily-debunked. Go to the Amazon.com page for Lies..., search inside the book on "invented the internet" and it'll cough up page 40, where you can read Franken's presentation for yourself.

To recap: the "invented the internet" quote first appeared in a Republican party magazine, and made its way from there into the mainstream press, where it became an accepted fact, and an example of Gore's lies. The fact that Gore never actually said it ceased to matter as it became conventional wisdom. What Gore actually said, in typical politician "take credit for anything you can get away with taking credit for" was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Given that Gore had championed numerous technological funding bills that did indeed greatly aid in turning the early university and military computer networks into a computer system that evolved into the modern Internet, his comment seems pretty fair, objectively speaking.

Much of the book is devoted to this: pointing out common themes or quotes, showing that they're wrong, and explaining why and who made them up. Franken constantly quotes major right wing media figures, checks into their stories, and shows how they are lying. None of this proves that Democrats never lie, or that Republicans always lie; it's just going on a case by case basis, and leaving conclusions about the bigger picture open to further debate. Whether or not you find this entertaining or humorous says more about you than about Franken's book. I found it frequently-informative, totally unsurprising, somewhat tedious, but only slightly entertaining.

The better stuff in the book is the first hand stuff, where Franken talks about things he's done, conversations he's had, and so on. His story about attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2001 is a great read (Franken makes a mild comment about how well "Clinton's military" fared in Afghanistan after 9/11 to Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who cleverly replies, "Fuck you.") as is his story about speaking to an enrollment counselor at Bob Jones university, his famous argument with Bill O'Reilly at a book conference, and many more. These chapters are good since they're not just retellings of old information, and since Franken is good at telling a story. He's also good at making a convincing argument by presenting lots of detailed information, but since most of those chapters were about things I already knew, they didn't hold my interest as well.

My overall reaction to this book was much like my reaction to recent books I skimmed by other lefty writers like Molly Ivins and Eric Alterman. I tend to agree with their opinions on things, and since I read the news and blogs regularly I already know most of what they're writing about, so the book info wasn't interesting to me. If you spend less of your life reading about politics and foreign policy online, then you'll probably get a lot more new info than me out of these type of books, and your reading enjoyment will be much different.

When you consider that, and tack on the fact that Franken wrote Lies... more or less as a comedy, and you realize that comedy is very subjective, you can see that it's very difficult to predict your reaction to the material. I liked the info but knew most of it already, and didn't find him particularly funny, so I didn't think it was a great read. Flip through chapter one and see what you think of that, and judge your reading interest by that.