Oddly, it's when Kubrick focuses his cold and sometimes savage eye toward outright comedy that he's at his best. He's made only two films that I love, this one and "A Clockwork Orange" ("Lolita" is pretty great, too). Some may quibble with calling "A Clockwork Orange" a comedy... but watch it again. I promise, if you let yourself get into the right mindset, it's absolutely hilarious.
Kubrick's point-of-view was generally pretty cruel, often bordering on sociopathic — which made him a great satirist. For my money, of the three "comedies" I've mentioned, "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) is the funniest. Even in our modern, post-Cold War era, it's absolutely vicious in its humor.
It's also one of the most quotable movies of all time:
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." — General Jack D. Ripper
"You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company." — Colonel "Bat" Guano
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" — President Merkin Muffley
"Mein Führer! I can WALK!" — Dr. Strangelove
Peter Sellers turns in a virtuosic, three-part tour-de-force performance as President Muffley, Captain Lionel Mandrake, and — of course — Dr. Strangelove himself. But Kubrick was too smart to let his acknowledged comic genius get away with chewing up all the best moments. Both George C. Scott (as General "Buck" Turgison) and Sterling Hayden (as General Jack D. Ripper) are given some choice cuts of prime rib themselves.
What makes "Strangelove" so compelling and ultimately (funny as it is) terrifying is the fact that, absurd as it is, the premise was frighteningly close to reality. If you don't believe me, just check out Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe" from the same year. They are essentially the same film, down to the smallest of plot details. The only difference is that Lumet played it straight.
Kubrick beat Lumet to the screen by a few months and has mostly won the verdict of history ("Fail Safe" is really fucking good, by the way. You should see it). But it's important to note that both filmmakers were essentially drawing from the same source material — former R.A.F. pilot Peter George's novel "Red Alert," which managed to spook some higher ups at the Pentagon because it very clearly revealed some quite real flaws in our whole nuclear first response protocols.
These two films and this novel all came in the wake of both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was busy building bombs that yielded a payload one-tenth the power of the sun. On our own side, folks like Curtis LeMay were pre-occupied with such charming concepts as a "winnable nuclear war." Think about all this and read that New Yorker article I linked to in the previous paragraph, and then rewatch this scene and see if you find at as silly as you probably did the first time.
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