Author Christopher Buckley discusses his latest effort, Boomsday, during a recent radio interview in New York. The novel offers a Swiftian proposal to solve the Social Security crisis by offering baby boomers tax breaks to commit suicide.

Christopher Buckley was in a cab in Manhattan on his way to Grand Central Station when he saw a man walking along with a distinctively yellow- and aqua-striped book in his hand.

“Excuse me, sir! Are you enjoying that book?” Buckley recalls shouting out the window to the startled passer-by. “I wrote it!”

The man responded in a New York minute.

“Would you sign it?” he yelled back.

And Buckley, leaning out the window as the cab accelerated, did.

It was an amusing, slightly absurd moment, not unlike the ones Buckley deftly inserts into his satiric novels, to wonderful effect. Buckley is the author of 12 books, including the recent “Boomsday,” as well as founder and editor in chief of Forbes FYI magazine (now called ForbesLife).

Mock seriousness is a style Buckley has perfected. His 2004 novel “Florence of Arabia” centers on a scheme to emancipate Arab women through a Lifetime-like TV channel.

His 1994 “Thank You for Smoking,” which focuses on conscienceless lobbyists for the tobacco and alcohol industries and the National Rifle Association (who dryly call themselves the “Merchants of Death”), became a movie in 2005.

“Boomsday” offers the Swiftian modest proposal that the way to solve the Social Security crisis is to offer baby boomers the incentive of “transitioning” – that is, committing suicide in return for tax breaks and other perks.

“Boomsday” involves a fictitious software program called RIP-ware that accurately assesses life expectancy, a handy tool for money-hungry insurers and nursing home operators, and Spider Repellent, software that deletes embarrassing stories from computer search engines. For all Buckley knows, such programs already may be in development.

“The hardest part about writing satire is competing with the front page,” he says in a telephone interview from Washington, where, like New York, he has a home.

Disgruntled Republican

What’s not hard for Buckley is understanding politics – his next novel will tweak the famously tight-lipped Supreme Court. After all, his father, William F. Buckley Jr., founded National Review magazine and helped define contemporary conservative thought. And for two years, Christopher Buckley served as a speechwriter for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

“Life is accidental,” Buckley says. “His speechwriter had resigned, and they needed a warm body. The press secretary had read me in Esquire (where Buckley became managing editor at age 24). It was an adventure – heady stuff for a 29-year-old.”

Out of this experience came his 1986 mock-memoir “The White House Mess,” which parodied the self-importance of those who serve presidents.

“It would have been much worse had I not been there … ” Buckley gravely intones in the manner of a self-serving memoirist.

A lifelong, if currently disgruntled, Republican, Buckley admired and respected the first President Bush. But what, one wonders, might it have been like to write speeches for his son?

“Bush 43 has actually given some rather good speeches, though I dissented from the ‘Axis of Evil’ speech,” Buckley says. “Speeches haven’t been his problem … Everything else has been his problem.”

Would he be interested in supporting a third-party candidate, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg?

“Not really,” Buckley says. “Third parties can make for a more lively campaign, but in the end, you know the election is going to go to a donkey or an elephant. All Ross Perot did, in the end, was demonstrate what a nut-job he was – and threw the election to Bill Clinton.

“I was despairing of my old beloved GOP before last November. I wrote an article for the Washington Monthly saying I hoped we would lose both houses. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes; you may just get it.

“I’m pulling for Giuliani. He’d make for a very watchable presidency. All President Bloomberg would do is ban smoking from sea to shining sea.”

Buckley thinks it’s probable that the courting of social conservatives had a downside for the GOP.

“The Terry Schiavo business was a catastrophe – a repugnant business all around and they (Bush, Lieberman, Frist et al.) should be ashamed of themselves for it. It’s clear from the way Republicans are now talking that they now grasp just what a catastrophe it was and the political price they’ll be paying for years to come.”

Reality comedy

Buckley, whom author Tom Wolfe once called one of the three funniest writers in America – the other two being Hunter Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke – says there’s a vogue now for “reality comedy, to strive to approximate real life rather than to deflect it.”

But he sees “too much insult – a crummy, unsettling kind of humor.”

Borat, he says, referring to the outrageous Sacha Baron Cohen character, “is funny, but he leaves you with a metallic taste in your mouth.”

As for the right-wing darling, Ann Coulter?

“She’s a provocateur – and very good at it. She is calculated to outrage, and she succeeds. You could call it performance art – and I’d love to have her lecture fees.”