Even if you ignore the title, Dr. Strangelove establishes its central joke right from the opening credits, when we
see one Air Force plane re-fueling another in mid-flight while “Try
a Little Tenderness” plays on the soundtrack. From that
to General Jack D. Ripper’s obsession with his “precious
bodily fluids” and the “essence” he refuses to share
with women, to General Buck Turgidson’s (note that turgid means swollen and distended) relationship to the one actress in the
film, to the “survival kit” given to the B-52 pilots, to
the president being named Merkin Muffley (wow — just wow), to
Major “King” Kong’s iconic last ride (note what he
is riding), to the plans for how the men in the war room plan to survive
a nuclear holocaust and re-populate the world, Dr. Strangelove exploits the connection between war and sex — a connection that goes back as far as Aristophanes’s classic comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens refuse to have sex until the men end the war with Sparta — for all it is worth. Discuss how the film uses sexual comedy
to achieve political and even existential satire.
Consider this film as a work of absurdism. What
about it, if anything, reminds you of Catch-22? How is
it different?
As I have said in class, satire is often funniest when played
straight. Peter George’s novel Red Alert is not
a comedy, and when Kubrick began working on this film, he imagined it
as drama or political thriller and planned to call it Edge of Doom. Only after he started working on the script did he begin thinking that
it would be better as a satire. At that point, he brought in Terry
Southern as a collaborator. (Later, George and Southern offered
conflicting accounts of who had contributed what, and the issue was
complicated further because Peter Sellers improvised some of his own
lines.) Also, Kubrick famously did not tell Slim Pickens — who plays
Major Kong, the B-52 pilot who goes the extra mile to make sure his
nuclear bomb reaches its destination — that the movie was a comedy; Pickens
actually believed he was in a drama. Yet Dr. Strangelove also
has an element of farce. You may notice that the war-room contains
a long table laden with desserts, including pies; Kubrick originally
planned to end the film with a pie-fight. Consider the way the
different kinds of comedy (slapstick, satire, farce, and anything else
you see) work together in this film.