S3E16: How a comedy about dropping bombs became the standard for satirical send-ups
"Dr. Strangelove" pokes fun at Cold War fears in the middle of the Cold War
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb has become a fixture in pop culture over the last 60 years, as we’ve seen bomb-riding cowboys and secret underground war rooms depicted in all forms of media ever since. Some of the subjects of my next few podcasts could be seen this way, with Green Day’s Dookie cover art featuring 1960s style jet dropping bombs and Blast from the Past starting its story in the early 60s with a Dr. Strangelove-esque family patriarch.
Kubrick is usually not associated with the comedy genre and that’s because Dr. Strangelove is hardly a screwball, slap-sticky, buddy comedy affair. It’s a comedy as only Stanley Kubrick would make.
The story of an abrupt and arbitrary nuclear attack on the Soviet Union orchestrated or dealt with by a series of zany characters comes across as something that would be saved for after Cold War tensions had thawed a bit, say in the 1970s or early 1990s (be sure to tune in on February 14th for an episode about this very thing in the form of 1999’s Blast from the Past).
The closest the world got to the Cold War turning into a hot one was the early 1960s. From 1960 to this film’s release in January of 1964 the world witnessed the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Coincidentally, a Soviet fighter shot down an unarmed American Air Force jet over East Germany the day before Dr. Strangelove premiered, killing three US Airmen.
Only in America could a newspaper contain this headline and a movie listing for its fictional, satirical counterpart. It says a lot about a society if they can laugh off impending doom and even poke fun at it. The timing of Dr. Strangelove’s production and release is a very clear and telling reflection of Western culture in mid-Cold War era.
That was the crux of my conversation with JF Brandon, my drop-in guest at Strawbery Banke Museum this past summer. As it often happens, this unplanned exchange took a few tangents, but I learned a lot of cool things from JF, including the coolness of his adopted hometown of New Ipswich, NH’s recycling center (or primary source factory, in my eyes), and that his mother is a celebrated Canadian military historian, Laura Brandon.
Follow me on Instagram for your daily dose of History through Pop Culture!