Mutual Assured Destruction is Funny Too

In connection with the current brouhaha over the New Yorker’s Barrack and Michelle Obama cover, The Reliable Source of yesterday’s Washington Post reports that the satire in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” went right over the newspaper’s metaphorical head when it first appeared. The Post’s Feb. 21, 1964 review of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was entitled “Film with A-War Theme Creates New World Problems for U.S.” (For those of you too young to remember, the one-letter prefix in “A-War” meant “Atomic,” just as “A-bomb” referred to the atom bomb and “H-bomb” to the hydrogen bomb.) Apparently the comedic possibilities of a nuclear holocaust were off-limits. According to the review, the film’s supposedly “anti-American” tenor “completely neglects the vast precautions aimed at preventing just such a possibility.” And the ultimate indictment: “Moscow gold could not have purchased a better piece of propaganda.”

The last statement makes me wonder what the reviewer was doing when the Russian premier played the emotional drunk who revealed the ultimate deterrent, a doomsday device that no one could turn off and that no one in the West had known existed. Be that as it may, the Reliable Source reminds us that others felt differently than the Post, for the movie won four Oscar nominations. And nowadays the American Film Institute ranks it third for all-time funniest movies and thirty-ninth for all-time best films.

Here’s the original trailer by Pablo Ferro: