Film recommendation.

Mr. Morris said he did not conceive of �Four Lions� as a provocation: �It wasn�t about getting the least likely subject for a comedy and then making a film about it, but the other way around.� After 9/11 � and with greater intensity after the 2005 London bombings � he immersed himself in books and articles on Islamic history and culture, not knowing where his research would lead.

�I wanted to understand what was going on,� he said. �Once I started reading I found things that made me laugh.�

As he pieced together a ground-level view of Islamic extremism � talking to a wide spectrum of British Muslims, interviewing security experts, poring over transcripts and documents from terrorism trials � he noticed an abundance of plans gone wrong and a pattern of incongruous situations and idiotic behavior: the makings of farce, in other words.

There were the would-be terrorists who set up a training camp in the woods but slept in their van because they were afraid of mice. Recordings by the MI5 security service of a London cell turned up �reams of rubbish dialogue,� Mr. Morris said, �like debates about who�s cooler, bin Laden or Johnny Depp� and puzzled questions about the exact purpose of all that fertilizer they had purchased.