Undisciplined form of satire

The most exhausting part of a satirist's work has to be outracing the truth. How can you be out-of-the-box outrageous about, say, a Supreme Court nomination, when reality has already outpaced you? When anybody can hunt through the C-SPAN archive and find the words "Coke can" and "pubic hair" uttered in a Senate confirmation hearing?

When the reason the United States has a Video Privacy Protection Act is that while Judge Robert Bork was being vetted for the U.S. Supreme Court, someone at Bork's local video rental store spilled the beans about what he liked to watch? ("A Day at the Races," "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and the supremely forgettable "Ruthless People.")

Yes, sometimes reality is generous to the satirist, and sometimes it's cruel. When it's cruel, it can force him to labor so hard for something more comically implausible than reality that he overreaches into slapstick.

Satire requires the discipline to pull back from the temptation to deliver just one more bit. That's what Christopher Buckley needed to do more often in his book "Supreme Courtship."

The acidulous son of William F. Buckley Jr. has turned out some funny stuff -- "Thank You for Smoking" is textbook satire. So I picked up "Supreme Courtship" with first-date anticipation. The high court is a large and tempting target -- revered and reviled, opaque and near omnipotent. Why stop at a novel? Where's the HBO series?

"Courtship" is launched with that juiciest of presidential plums, a Supreme Court vacancy.

President Donald P. Vanderdamp wants nothing more than to lose his re-election so that he can take his bowling ball and go home.

Two of his court nominees get grilled to a turn, then turned out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of them because the movie review he wrote for his elementary school newspaper characterized "To Kill a Mockingbird" as somewhat "boring."

Enter Pepper Cartwright, a sashaying cliché, a sassy Texas gal who exudes hubba-hubba and courtroom common sense down to her Tony Lamas as presiding judge and star of the legal reality show "Courtroom Six." She's in fine form late one night as Vanderdamp watches her on TV and is inspired to give the process the middle finger by nominating her to the highest court in the land.

Any of the tangled plot lines could work better if Buckley didn't hustle through them like an Olympic hurdler.

Still, Buckley is too witty not to give us some of those luscious moments that force us to laugh at something we know we shouldn't.