HUMORIST FOR HIRE FINDS LOTS TO SKEWER.

Byline: Fred Shuster Daily News Staff Writer

Writing successful satire gets harder every year, especially in an age when chief executives of tobacco companies testify before Congress that nicotine couldn't possibly be addictive and the Supreme Court rules that a sexual-harassment lawsuit can go forward against a sitting president.

For humorist and editor Christopher Buckley, though, hypocrisy is the soil in which his garden grows. He says he's thankful for the defense attorneys, politicians and, yes, cigarette lobbyists who ``keep people like me in business.''

Buckley, a witty social satirist whose widely read 1994 farce, ``Thank You for Smoking'' (Random House; $22), a parody of the alcohol, tobacco and gun lobbies, was optioned for the movies by Mel Gibson, admits his sense of the absurd was inherited.

When he wasn't in boarding school run by Benedictine monks, Buckley grew up in a 15-room waterfront home in Stamford, Conn., son of a socialite and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr.

``My parents were both larger-than-life people,'' Buckley said. ``People with larger than the normal sense of humor. Mom was more a Noel Coward sort with a delicious sense of the ridiculous. Dad was a very, very funny guy.''

Buckley's fifth and latest book, ``Wry Martinis'' (Random House; $22), draws from essays and columns that have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Forbes FYI, the Washington Post and other publications.

``We looked for stuff that was either funny or personal,'' Buckley, 44, explained. ``I had quite a lot of other stuff that might have made me out to be a slightly more serious author. In the end, we cut some 60 pages out of the galleys. I asked the publisher why, and they said they didn't want to make it any longer than any of my previous books. Apparently, people get used to a certain size of book from authors.''

Along with his free-lance career, Buckley toils as editor of Forbes FYI, a quarterly leisure supplement to Forbes magazine. It was there that Buckley invented and published a hoax about Russian officials auctioning off the embalmed remains of everybody's favorite dictator, Vladimir Lenin, to raise cash. ABC News swallowed the story whole, leading to a low-level international incident.

``Being a free-lancer is almost like being a studio musician,'' Buckley said. ``You do different gigs for various people.''

Buckley moved to Washington, D.C., in 1981 as a speech writer for then-Vice President Bush. He also met and married the daughter of Bush national security adviser Donald P. Gregg. She worked for the CIA at the time, but now raises their two young children.

``Wry Martinis'' contains fake best-seller lists, a yuppie version of the late Allen Ginsberg's ``Howl,'' phony confidential memos and other funny stuff.

``I love working at home,'' Buckley said. ``I love being interrupted by a 5-year-old who has a splinter or wants to show me something. But at times, you want to kill them because it takes about an hour to get into that writing zone, that trancelike state where you have finally blocked out everything and all you see in front of you is the screen.

``If someone comes in at just that moment, you want to strangle them. It's literally like snapping out of a trance, and you have to start all over again. But that's why door locks were invented.''

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Photo: Free-lance satirist and Forbes FYI editor Christopher Buckley's fifth book, ``Wry Martinis,'' draws from his recent essays and columns.