He was half of the comedy team "Franken and Davis," founded with Al Franken in high school. Their specialty, especially on "Saturday Night Live" (1975), was political satire. Tom's friendship with Al Franken nearly ended for good in the early 1990s, but in the Star Tribune, Oct 18, 2003, he claimed, "I still love Al Franken like a brother," going on to say, "I'm happy for his success. He's always been able to piss people off; now he's finally directing it at the right people. If he wants to come up and get a barbecue going, it's an open-ended invitation." They reconciled in 2001, and Franken frequently invited Tom to appear on the "The Al Franken Show" on Air America radio, where, among other characters, he portrayed a Native American who insisted that his tribe's beliefs ought to be taught alongside creationism in Christian-minded schools. In 1975, Franken and Davis were hired by Lorne Michaels to fill a single apprentice writer slot; they split one salary of $350 per week. In a June 8, 2006, appearance at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, together with Al Franken, Davis did a live performance featuring a sketch in which he impersonated a Jack Daniels Distilleries executive, Frank Wade (or some similar name), who was invited to speak about "what to do if you're drunk and you absolutely have to drive." Davis says, among many other satirical lines, "If I had to be in an car crash, I'd rather be drunk." Franken looks at the audience and says, in a subdued manner, "I can't fight that logic, I guess.". In the final months of Davis's bout with cancer, Davis referred to death as "deanimation", an allusion to his friend Timothy Leary, who used the term extensively 1995-1996 in the months leading to Leary's own death.
