Thank You For Smoking is a 1994 novel by Christopher Buckley, a satire of the tobacco industry and the lobbyists who fight to keep it from being abolished.
In Washington, Nick Naylor is the main spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, the main lobbying arm of the tobacco industry. He makes thousands of dollars a year arguing publicly that smoking is safe, in spite of all the evidence that says otherwise, and he's good at it. Unfortunately, this has drawn the attention of a radical anti-smoking group who've declared that they're going to kill him.
Later adapted into a movie starring Aaron Eckhart and Katie Holmes.
This book contains examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Nick Naylor, Heather Holloway, and Bobby Jay Bliss.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Late in the book, Gomez saves Nick's bacon and provides him with clues.
- Guns in Church: The Merchants of Death try to spin an actual church shooting when an old lady in the congregation complains that she could have saved the situation if it had not been for the law requiring her to leave her gun outside. This falls apart after they find out that the shooter was a lifetime member of SAFETY.
- Japandering: It's noted that it's easier to get American celebrities to hawk cigarettes in foreign advertisements, as most other countries don't have the same stigma against smoking that America has.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Lady Bent is obviously based on Margaret Thatcher, including her past as a former PM of the United Kingdom and her hatred of the IRA.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Early in the book, Nick is deliberately set up to share a talk show stage with a Littlest Cancer Patient and thus be ruined; he manages to actually get out of it with better publicity than before.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Both averted and played straight. On the one hand, Oprah Winfrey and Larry King have roles in the book, but Lady Bent is a rather transparent Expy of Margaret Thatcher, and Senator Ortolan K. Finisterre seems to be a stand-in for Ted Kennedy.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Nick Naylor used to be a television news reporter until one fateful day when he erroneously reported that the President had choked to death on a chicken bone, resulting in a brief panic that sent the stock markets into freefall. Realizing that he would never escape that, he left journalism completely and became a spokesman for the tobacco industry.
- Only Known By His Nickname: Nick's kidnapper looks so much like Peter Lorre that that's all the novel ever calls him.
- Really Gets Around: Nick has a fairly active sex life, including simultaneous flings with Heather and Jeannette. The Movie removed a lot of this, for which director Ivan Reitman apologized to Aaron Eckhart in the DVD commentary.
- Refuge in Audacity: Pushed into a televised debate with Senator Finisterre, and unable to refute the many studies showing a link between cigarettes and cancer, Nick somehow manages to transition into a debate about cheese.
- Stealth Cigarette Commercial: The "anti-smoking" ad that the ATS comes up with proclaims "Everything your parents told you about smoking is right."
