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"I thought I'd talk to you about health care reform," political satirist Christopher Buckley told his Charlotte audience Wednesday night.
Luckily, he was joking.
Instead, the author of "Little Green Men," "Boomsday" and "Thank You for Smoking" kicked off the Charlotte-Mecklenburg library's 19th Novello Festival of Reading with stories and jokes that kept his ImaginOn audience laughing. More than 400 people attended the event.
If there was a theme to Buckley's talk, it was the challenge of political satire in modern America. More than once, Buckley's satire has foreshadowed real political events. And sometimes, readers have mistaken his satire as fact.
Once, he perpetrated a hoax story that cash-strapped Soviets were auctioning off Lenin's embalmed corpse to raise money. Peter Jennings went with the story on ABC and a Texas man bid $37 million. The Soviets were not amused.
Buckley drew laughs almost continuously, particularly when he described a litany of rejected titles he'd proposed for one humor collection:
• "Homage to Tom Clancy," chosen in hopes that the mega-bestselling writer's billions of fans would mistake it for the real thing. It would have been an ironic choice, Buckley said, given that he'd once panned a Clancy novel, citing Mark Twain's comment about a novel: "Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up."
• "Oval Sex in the Oral Office," inspired by his daughter, who, at age 10, asked her father during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, "Dad, what's oval sex?"
• "Bassholes," a title Buckley concocted as part of a New Yorker humor piece allegedly reviewing books on fly-fishing. "Bassholes" was supposedly a book written by a trout enthusiast attacking bass fishermen. After the piece ran, Buckley learned that readers were heading to bookstores in search of the nonexistent book.
A northerner by birth, Buckley has South Carolina ties. His grandparents settled in Camden, S.C., and he still has family there.
Years ago, he recalled, he was introduced to Strom Thurmond at Camden's Carolina Cup steeplechase. He was on LSD at the time. It was, he said, a memorable moment.
Buckley's latest book, "Losing Mum and Pup," is a memoir recounting the year in which he lost both of his famous parents, William and Pat Buckley. When he opened the floor to questions, one woman wondered why he called his parents "Mum" and "Pup."
It was in part because his mother was a Canadian Anglophile, he said. He also explained the source of his late father's much-imitated aristocratic speaking style: William F. Buckley, Christopher's father, spent his early years in Mexico and learned Spanish as his first language. He learned English at age 6, in London.
Some people thought it was affected, Buckley said. "I thought we were British until I was 8 years old."
