Thank you for smoking is (nearly) pure satire, similar to the Tim Robbins pic Bob Roberts. It pokes fun at Big Tobacco (natch), but mainly, it skewers our victimization culture of poor education and worse parenting.
It’s oddly flat, in the same way I found Bob Roberts flat–the central character is an anti-hero, so as the action ‘rises’, I found myself more depressed–we are that dumb as a nation. Yes, we do fall for straight lines like that. Yes, we’re eager to believe anyone who’ll tell us that the road to Nirvana is smoking a pack of cigarettes per day, chugging Coca-Cola, downing three meals of McDonalds, watching 10 hours of TV, and playing PS3 the remaining 12 hours of our impotent (in both senses) existence.
The message here, to me, is be wary of those selling something too good to be true.