Dr Strangelove is a black comedy, but it wasn't originally conceived as such. In fact, Kubrick and his backers had purchased the serious-as-cancer novel Fail Safe and had intended to do a straight adaptation. The comedy seemed to just creep in as Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter Sellars began to put their stamp on the material. In this sense, Strangelove belongs to a group of Kubrick's films that can and have been labelled black comedies, including his previous collaboration with Sellars, Lolita, as well as Clockwork Orange and The Shining. I think Kubrick's tendency in this regard can be traced to his fascination with the disjunction between human hopes and expectations, and reality--call it his existentialism. When you have seen The Shining enough times, Wendy's early exclamation, "we're all going to have a real good time!" becomes a laugh line. The disjunction between what we wish, what we assume, and what really happens is ripe for either tragedy or comedy, but not much in between. Lesser artists who try to mix them up, usually end up with melodrama or farce, but Kubrick avoids this by keeping the melodrama out of the frame altogether, as in Strangelove, or making it the creation of the characters and the subject of his camera rather than an effect of his movie, as in Lolita. Strangelove famously came perilously close to descending into farce, but Kubrick wisely chose to delete the pie-fight-in-the-war-room scene in post-production! Two movies of Kubrick's that seem to have no trace of black comedy, Paths of Glory and Barry Lyndon, are coming up next. I don't think it's a coincidence that they are the two films of Kubrick's that most obsessively explore the themes of authority, rules and convention.
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