It's been four years since the general U.S. release of Four Lions, Chris Morris' pitch-black satire about a crew of inept wannabe suicide bombers in the north of England, and almost five since the movie debuted at Sundance. Since then, as many as 500 British citizens have left their homes to join ISIS, the terrorist group seeking to establish a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, with one 21-year-old British national, Hamzah Parvez, sending an online message home to fellow Muslims urging them to join him. "Are we content with eating Nando's every week?" Parvez asks, referring to the inexpensive Portuguese chicken chain ubiquitous on British high streets. "Come to the land of jihad and shout Allah."

The jihadi preoccupation with fried chicken features in Four Lions' opening scene, where ringleader Omar (Riz Ahmed) and his exceptionally dimwitted friend Waj (Kayvan Novak) are attempting to film propaganda videos railing against decadent Western imperialism. As Omar starts to use the Big Mac as a metaphor for cultural degradation, Waj interrupts: "Flippin' idiots. You could have gone Chicken Cottage, proper halal, bargain bucket, £6.99."

Four Lions takes Charlie Chaplin's quote about life being a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long-shot and inverts it. As a concept, terrorism goes beyond abhorrence, but the day-to-day intricacies of it are another story, like the tale Morris tells about how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed once held up a television interview for two hours because he was trying to find an outfit that didn't make him look fat, or the British jihadists who ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon before they left for Syria. While public instinct is usually to mythologize terrorists as fearsome bearers of impossible doom, frequently the reality, as Morris deftly demonstrates, is far less imposing.

52-year-old Morris is a cult figure in the U.K., partly because of his iconoclastic takes on subjects like pedophilia and drugs in the satirical news show Brass Eye, and partly because of his reclusiveness. Prior to the release of Four Lions in 2010 he refused virtually all interview requests as a matter of course, and has stayed out of the spotlight ever since, although he occasionally flies to Baltimore to direct episodes of Veep for Armando Iannucci (the pair collaborated on the spoof 1994 news show The Day Today). But during the period Morris was promoting Four Lions, his debut feature film, he gave unprecedented access to the media, talking over and over again about his motivations for making the movie. "It wasn't about getting the least likely subject for a comedy and then making a film about it, but the other way round," he told The New York Times. "I wanted to understand what was going on. Once I started reading I found things that made me laugh."

Waj, simple-minded Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), and wannabe rapper Hassan (Arsher Ali) seem motivated more by the promise of glory and a fast-tracked, "sweet VIP lounge" route to heaven than by any particular deference to Allah, whose name is rarely invoked in the film. Instead, martyrdom is more a mission to one-up kafirs, who aren't so much unbelievers as straw enemies. "Our plan is, right, to put a bomb on a crow and fly it into one of them towers filled with Jews and slags," says Faisal. "Let's do Boots," says Waj, referring to the drugstore chain. "They sell condoms that make you wanna bang white girls." In a furious invective against British culture, Omar rails against a lengthy list of enemies, including upmarket grocery stores, torture, Disneyland, dead Afghanis, and Gordon Ramsay.