The Magic Christian

It was Terry Southern who had the balls to tell Stanley Kubrick that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy and not the oh-so-serious anti-nuclear muckraking political tract Kubrick believed he'd conceived.

Kubrick listened and a classic was born. It was Peter Sellers who turned Kubrick on to The Magic Christian, Southern's masterpiece about human greed, and the book opened the director's mind to the possibility that Southern just might be a special kind of thinker. Plus, face it, if you were Kubrick and Sellers was telling you something, you were going to take it seriously.

Southern knew what kind of film Kubrick was, without knowing it, actually making because the novelist was intimately connected with the absurd. Southern understood plenty about comedy and its role in blowing apart the dearest old myths of his nation. To Southern, nothing was as absurd as a nation willing to annihilate humanity to save humanity, which gives war and the bomb and mankind's ability to justify their existence an ultimately paradoxical and bizarre sheen.

Take another myth, which Southern obliterates in The Magic Christian, surely one of the top ten funniest fictions every written by an American. The myth of the detached fiscal aesthete. The man who is above needing or wanting money.

Do you remember the premise of the story, which was a decade after its 1959 publication made into a movie with Sellers in the lead role, but unfortunately without Kubrick as director?

Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire, has a wicked cruel streak and a desire to demonstrate how hypocritical people can be. He gives people money to make asses of themselves and discovers that nothing is too debasing for an American to try if enough cash is offered in exchange. At one point Grand tosses 100K into a vat of shit and tells people to have at it if they want, and of course people jump into the shit to retrieve the money.

And that is just one of the many situations Southern creates to demonstrate his discomfort with the American idiotacracy. Southern is an overlooked writer, which is kind of sad.

TS