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Making fun of terrorism: best ammunition we have
Chris Morris film Four Lions shows we need to laugh at the ineptitude of terrorists
Chris Morris's comedy film, Four Lions, about a group of bungling British Muslim terrorists who try to attack the London Marathon, premiered to a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday - the same day Home Secretary Alan Johnson announced he was raising the UK terrorism alert level from 'substantial' to 'severe'.
Yet if Four Lions contains any truths at all, the government has little chance of being taken seriously when it makes such pronouncements.
As for Osama bin Laden, he came out on Sunday to 'claim' for al-Qaeda the Christmas Day plot to blow up an airliner over Detroit. Why would the world's most feared terrorist leader endorse a bungled attempt that has landed the perpetrator, Farouk Abdul Mutallab, with the moniker "The underpants bomber". Does Osama perhaps have a sense of humour?
Four Lions was conceived by Morris, the satirist behind such media-skewering TV series as The Day Today and Brass Eye. He says he first came up with the idea of a film about incompetent jihadis when he read of a plot to destroy a US warship at night. The terrorists slipped their boat into the water at the quayside and stacked it with explosives. It sank. "I laughed," said Morris.
"I wasn't expecting that. You know the Hamburg cell was lead by Mohamed Atta - but did you know he was so strict that the other plotters called him 'The Ayatollah'? That every time he formed an Islamic discussion group he was so critical he fired them all within a week?"
Morris added: "The unfathomable world of extremism seemed to contain elements of farce."
The director does not portray any actual events in Four Lions, even if the Daily Mail claims the film is based loosely on the Leeds terrorist cell that carried out the July 7, 2005 London bombings.
But the warship debacle is clearly an influence. When one plotter accidentally blows himself and a sheep up on a hillside, his friend asks, "Is he a martyr or is he a Jalfrezi?" And in the film's climactic scene, the suicide bombers wear ridiculous fancy dress costumes in the course of their attack on the marathon.
Four Lions is Morris's first foray into film, and the controversial subject matter appears to have persuaded several reviewers to distance themselves from the movie by asking the question: "Is it OK to laugh at terrorism?"
Nick Fraser wrote in the Observer: "To say that I found Morris's film disquieting would be an understatement. I wondered whether it was funny, even when I did laugh." While on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Tom Brooks spent almost his entire item contemplating whether "terrorism is no laughing matter". Little wonder Chris Morris refused him an interview.
Those who have felt able to actually review the film have been generally well-disposed. The Guardian's Jeremy Kay gave a warm review to "a buddy movie about confused men". And Empire cut straight to the chase and said: "Four Lions will prove to be one of the most original, provocative and enduring comedies of the early 21st century."
Chris Morris isn't the first person to take the mickey out of jihad, but he is perhaps the most high profile white person to do so. Until now, the job has been left to Muslim comedians like Shazia Mirza, although their humour has tended towards poking fun at westerners' negative perceptions of innocent Asians. Morris represents part of a growing tendency towards mocking the extremists themselves.
This month in London sees a limited run of Jihad! The Musical, a rehashed version of a show that grabbed headlines at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival, co-written by twenty-somethings Zoe Samuel and Benjamin Scheuer.
The musical includes such songs as Building a Bomb Today, The Jihad Jive and I Wanna Be Like Osama, which itself upstaged al-Qaeda's main man on YouTube, according to Scheuer. "Osama bin Laden put a video out just after the Edinburgh Festival," he said. "When you searched for Osama on YouTube, our video appeared above his. Our mockery came before his lunacy."
Two months before the festival, terrorists had driven a burning car into Glasgow Airport - an attack widely regarded as unsuccessful to the point of ineptitude. The Scottish comedians Billy Connolly and Frankie Boyle were both moved to comment on the naivety of al-Qaeda attempting to bring religious war to the notoriously sectarian Glasgow.
Such comments led Professor Michael Clarke, a former government defence advisor to the UN, to say last September: "Some of the most valuable counter-terrorism experts are comedians. They are doing more than anything the Government is doing... a lot of what these terrorists say and claim to believe is actually pathetic and juvenile."
So, yes, it is okay to laugh at terrorists. And the sooner the media relax about it, the better. ·
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Comments
Haven't we all been making jokes about suicide bombers already ( if we are honest ever since day one of 9/11). It's refreshing to see any media start to take the rise publicly about this subject. As terrorism has taken the new "bogey man" status for the State to use as an excuse to strip away our human decency it gves us all hope.
It's all very well that we liberal white westerners have a jolly good laugh at our garden shed bomb makers and their armchair jihad. However, it doesn't get us any closer to understanding why they want to kill us. Laughing at your enemy - in other words belittling him - makes him more determined to kill you, not less.
there's a jolly good piece of satire on the Glasgow attack here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFPY25-9ydg
I agree; humour is a good counter attack to the oh-so-serious extremists
Michael Jose, you're not very bright are you? You just don't get it. Morris always makes the narrow minded wince, he's a comedic genius, the clip here is brilliantly funny. Laughing at extremists is the best way to deflate them, taking them seriously merely inflates their egos and encourages them to think of themselves as important, whereas they are just pathetic little mysogenists with tiny willies. I've been wondering for years why comedians don't make a point about their gangs living together in caves without a woman to cook and clean, can you imagine how those places must stink? I did wonder myself why OBL would claim the ineptitude of the recent underpants bomber, must be desperate for publicity, which shows he's not as all powerful as some would have us believe. Maybe he wears frocks when the media aren't present. Barry Larking, don't be so pretentious. Who cares when you will laugh?
I will laugh when terrorism is beaten.
To counteract Mankinds most horrific actions toward its own species, sometimes witty satire can be enormously beneficial! Like laughing,drinking and munching a pork pie buffet at a loved one's funeral,it's our way of coping to regain some form of control in its worst possible environment!
It is better to laugh then to live in terror, than to believe these people have so much power. I agree with the writer and Obama...to take credit for a moron who put explosives in his panty and set himself on fire proves Osama is desperate
Laughing at someone, laughing at what they believe, laughing at the reactions they provike, this is NOT the same as finding what they do funny. NOTHING is off limits when it comes to comedy & satire. The moment you say "you may not laugh at this", you are taking away a precious part of our freedom. One that is important, at least to me.
Great article, now let's all laugh about the bombers who blew up the London Underground and a Routemaster bus for an encore a few years ago. And did you hear the one about the female jihadist? She went around asking, "I say, I say, I say - does my bomb look big in this?"