Kubrick and Southern

Terry Southern 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. Peter Sellers had 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 making, even if the director didn't, because the novelist was intimately connected with the absurd. Southern understood plenty about comedy and its role in blowing apart the dearest old myths. To Southern, nothing was as absurd as a nation willing to annihilate humanity to save humanity.

Southern published The Magic Christian in 1959. Surely it is one of the top-ten funniest fictions every written by an American. It satirizes the myth of the detached fiscal aesthete--the man who is above needing or wanting money.

Here is the premise of the story, which was a decade after its 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 a human being 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.

Hell, who hasn't done that, metaphorically or otherwise?

Southern is an overlooked American writer.




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