Laughing in the Face of Destruction

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 2006)

Comedy is the ability of man to laugh when all he can do is cringe in terror, and Stanley Kubrick's beyond-black, so-black-it-stings comedy is at the top of the list of the funniest films ever made. Considering its subject matter -- world annihilation -- this is pretty risky stuff, considering it was made at a time when the Cold War was no laughing matter and at anytime someone could decide it was time to see if those pesky missiles would work. It shot Stanley Kubrick to the position of a Director as God, and from then on, his sporadic work would produce masterpiece after masterpiece. DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB is a fantastically cold, ironic, and masculine movie, but it's precisely this kind of detached, deadpan humor that makes it so outrageous. There are few moments that can't be considered iconic in cinema history -- truly, Peter Seller's "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room! " quote has gone down in history as one of the most absurd lines ever uttered, but his own little rendition as Dr. Stangelove, which hearkens to the mad scientist in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS who can't seem to control his cybernetic arm is comic genius at its most bizarre. However, Slim Pickens has the best exit scene in the entire film in a scene anyone familiar with Chuck Workman's VISIONS OF LIGHT or countless film montages detailing key moments in cinema in the Twentieth Century: his riding the bomb into destruction (that brings forth the end of the world as Vera Lynn sings "We'll Meet Again") is the stuff that nearly fifty years later has not been equaled.