Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb) is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.

The movie is centered on a bomber wing during the cold war. During the cold war, America had nuclear armed bombers circling around Russia, 24 hours a day, every day. Every individual bomber carried more firepower than all the bombs dropped in all of world war two combined. They were all 2 hours away from their targets.

This movie is about a wing commander who goes insane and decides to bomb Russia, so he seals off the base and issues the go codes. What follows is two hours of hilarity as the United States works with Russia to try to avoid world war three and the inhalation of mankind. Needless to say, everything goes wrong and the movie ends as billions are being killed.

Possibly the funniest thing is the complete incompetence (or skill) of the characters. The people who you would expect to make good decisions and handle stress well respond horribly to the situation. And in contrast, the characters who you’d expect to mess up, the comically diverse and naive crew, preforms amazingly and has success… if you’d call it that. The president is nervous, the Russian premier is drunk, the generals are stupid and either cowards or overly aggressive, and the base commander is completely insane.

To counter that, the crew on the bomber has every obstacle imaginable thrown at them and they continue to have good luck and they perform well. The cowboy pilot from Texas who swaps his flight helmet for a cowboy hat when they get the code leads them all the way in. All the members of the crew remain calm and do what they are supposed to. In fact there is a scene where the president asks a general if the plane will actually be able to make it there and start the war they are trying to stop. The general begins to explain how they are trained and slowly shifts into giddy excitement about the skills of the pilots until he realizes that he was getting excited about something that would be the death of him.

The humor is a little dark but I love it and I think most people would. It’s a hilarious take on the cold war and it comes from a time when total inhalation was a very real possibility. One of the funniest things to remember is that while all of the arguing and banter is happening, the people of the world are going about their day to day lives. Completely unaware of the struggle.

I highly recommend this movie. Unfortunately it is very hard to find but if you really want it you can buy it at Barnes and Noble.

Here is a link to a video of one of my favorite scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=231TmvIPzQQ