Home grown Asian suicide bombers are not an obvious choice for Comedy. But Director Chris Morris makes a surprisingly good job of it in a work which is skilfully written and performed. The best humour has a ring of truth about it. And so it is true here. The plot moves from satire, to slapstick to straight forwards storytelling, and back, at quite a pace leaving the audience to make its own mind up about whether certain bits are intended to be funny, or just turn out that way. That ambiguity is probably the film's strongest suit.

A strong cast of Jihadists struggle to get a team together, struggle to get to a Training Camp in Pakistan from which they are sent home in disgrace, indeed they struggle to complete any task successfully. Yet they are not portrayed as buffoons. Never before has Muslim culture been lampooned like this, yet Morris shows it in such a way that they are Everyman jokes and should not cause offence to anyone.

The fact that this is low budget works to its advantage. The script and acting win and the documentary style filming gives it an authenticity which is vital for the humour to prosper. Riz Ahmed stars as Chief Jihadist Omar, but Nigel Lindsay steals the show as a Caucasian Muslim convert. Preeya Kalidas has a frustrating, underwritten role as Omar's wife. A nurse, and a mother we never really get her insight into the prospect of her husband, and father of her son, embracing martyrdom, even though she pokes fun at an over zealous cleric when he visits their home.

At 100 minutes, the film ends when it needs to, in dramatic and compelling style and does not out stay its welcome. For some this will not be funny enough, for others it will simply be in poor taste. But we should be proud that this sort of comedy simply could not be made in America, and is the first cinematic attempt to deal with a relatively new, and disturbing, social phenomena.

I knew that Four Lions was about an Islamic terrorist cell made up of "home grown" UK terrorists, I knew that it was a comedy, and I knew that the man behind it was Chris Morris, a man whose TV satire can sometimes be a bit too savage for its own good.

And this film is a bit savage, too. But, let's be fair, it is very, very funny.

The film takes the form of a fly on the wall style documentary, following a mismatched group of Muslims - sincere family man Omar, moderate idiot Fessal, complete idiot Waj, diffident Hassan, and psychotic idiot firebrand convert Barry. Barry's master plan is to inflict jihad on a mosque to that Muslims will rise up because they will think Jews did it.

This film is uncomfortably close to home, and never mocks Islam, although it does mock the way some people interpret Islam for their own ends. But it also mocks the police and the establishment. And, with the exception of Omar, who has a clear vision of what he wants to accomplish and why (one may not agree with him, but he is sincere and devout about his intentions),all the others are deluded to a lesser or (usually) greater degree.

What happens in this film isn't funny in the slightest but, often, the way it happens is very funny indeed. I laughed out loud a lot, to my great surprise.

But it is very, very, dark.

Can suicide bombers ever be funny? That's the question posed by Chris Morris in his 2010 film FOUR LIONS, which follows the misadventures of a group of would-be extremists who plan to bring terror to the country's capital. The answer, in short, is yes – when they're depicted as a bunch of bumbling buffoons who'd be lucky to blow up a balloon, let alone London's streets.

FOUR LIONS is a comedy that adopts the docu-drama approach of THE OFFICE, although the laughs are decidedly nearer the knuckle here. If the aim of terrorists is to bring terror to the general public, then Morris's aim is to take some of that terror away by having us laugh at them instead. It works. FOUR LIONS is edgy and filled with humour as the audience engages in the various misadventures of the jihadists.

The acting is a highlight, with Riz Ahmed at the film's heart as the leader attempting to hold it all together and Nigel Lindsay stealing every scene as the lunk-headed white convert, although I did have a soft spot for Mohammad Aqil as the gentle Mahmood whose monologues and antics are particularly amusing. The winner here, of course, is Chris Morris, a man with a long history of filming the unfilmable and approaching the country's taboos. Kudos to him for pulling no punches come the hard-hitting climax, and keeping us laughing despite the extraordinarily dark subject matter.