Silver Screen Fiend_Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

Author:Patton Oswalt [Oswalt, Patton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-01-06T07:00:00+00:00

Friday, August 4,

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb at the New Beverly

I skipped a Friday night MADtv taping to go see this, which was probably my third viewing at that point. But it was the first of mine on the big screen and, seeing as it was listed in two of my Five Movie Books, a can’t-miss.

I’ve seen this movie at least four more times since that screening, but this is the one I remember the most. Probably because I was so thirsty to receive it. I’d spent the day struggling with some half-assed sketch idea of mine that I couldn’t find an engine for, a nebulous half-a-joke that stared back at me from my Mac’s screen like a snide drunk I was facing down in a bar. And now—Kubrick. Especially in Strangelove, a movie at once sprawling and precise, inhuman and tragic.

I remember this screening because, when Peter Sellers appears for the first time as Strangelove, reversing himself in his wheelchair (while keeping his head at the same jaunty angle and his smile in the same forced rictus as FDR), the crowd I was seeing it with exploded with applause. And we’d already seen him as Colonel Mandrake and President Muffley. But here he was, a much-imitated, recontextualized pop culture reference, springing up from his place of origin. Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source.

I left the screening feeling recharged in my nascent comedy snobbery. If Kubrick could wring laughs from nuclear annihilation at the height of the Cold War, while also throwing in Nazis, sexual frustration and the beginning of the nerds vs. jocks schism (Sellers’s Muffley vs. George C. Scott’s General Turgidson), then I should be going even farther with my sketches, with my stand-up, right?

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