Dr. Strangelove

Black comedy finds humor in things that we normally wouldn’t think of as funny – death, violence, war, for example. Depending on your tolerance, black comedy can either serve as a pressure release valve and be a coping mechanism for things too horrible to wrap your head around otherwise or it can just offend and mortify you. That combination of laughter and mortification is pretty much the point of black comedy – laughter mingled with deep uneasiness.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a perfect example of this kind of humor. An insane Air Force general orders a nuclear strike on strategic locations in Russia. He hunkers down in his air base, telling his men to fire on anyone who approaches because they are probably Commie spies even if they’re dressed like American military. Meanwhile, in the War Room, the President of the United States and his Chief of Staff along with other advisers try to figure out how to stop the strike. A Russian ambassador tells them his country has a Doomsday device – a series of secret nuclear bombs buried underground that will detonate if they are ever attacked. The fate of the entire world hangs in the balance. It all sounds very serious until you find out the crazy general is named Jack D. Ripper, the President is Merkin Muffley, his Chief of Staff is General Buck Turgidson, and later in the film we encounter a soldier named Bat Guano. At the peak of the Cold War, Kubrick played the whole thing for laughs – dark, absurd, uncomfortable laughs.

Of course, the great Peter Sellers plays three different roles: an RAF officer trying to talk Ripper down from his mad scheme, the nebbishy President Muffley, and the crazed ex-Nazi science adviser to the President, Dr. Strangelove himself. Each performance is complete and distinct and hilarious in its own way. Sellers’ line delivery when President Muffley calls Soviet Premier Kissof to discuss imminent nuclear disaster is comedic genius.

For me, the real standout besides Sellers was the actor who plays General Turgidson, George C. Scott, the hard-drinking, hard-living actor famous for playing another intense military man, General George Patton. Scott always seems to have violence waiting just beneath his surface which makes every performance he gave a little scary. So to see him almost mocking that persona and to be so loose and over-the-top is a pleasure. Rumor has it that Kubrick had Scott do some ridiculous warm-up takes that he swore he would never use in the movie and then, of course, used only those takes in the final cut of the film. Apparently, Scott swore he’d never work with Kubrick again because of his deception.

The whole film is ridiculous, and I laughed throughout, but I was also unsettled. I can only imagine how moviegoers of 1964 felt seeing some of the most serious issues in the world and on their minds portrayed on screen by characters who are nutjobs, extremists, buffoons, and dolts. The underlying concern is that maybe the people in power, those with their finger on the button or the trigger or with that pen to sign things into law just aren’t that smart, that maybe none of us are and that all this running around we do trying to prevent or mitigate disaster really is just a black comedy from which we can’t escape.

The film is over fifty years old, so I hope it isn’t too much of a spoiler to say it doesn’t end well for anyone. The final montage is of a series of nuclear explosions set to the tune of Vera Lynn’s World War II era hit, “We’ll Meet Again.” The juxtaposition of the song’s smooth, nostalgic sentimentality against stark black and white images of the most destructive force on the planet demolishing everything around it is actually pretty funny. Until it’s not.