Satire is a lesson. Parody is a game. — Vladimir Nabokov
The devil, the proude spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. — Thomas Moore
In 2005, a London production of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play Tamburlaine the Great was subject to minor editing by its director. A part of one of the scenes needed to be cut, it was decided — not cut down, but cut out. The scene in question showed the burning of books, one of which was the Koran (which the BBC went through a phase of referring to as “the holy Koran”). This artistic redaction prompted accusations of appeasement, although director David Farr flatly denied this in a piece for The Guardian:
It is complete nonsense to suggest, as The Times did yesterday, that my decision to alter the burning-of-the-books scene in Tamburlaine was based on a desire to appease Islamic opinion. As I made clear, my decision to adapt the text was purely artistic. Journalists and academics often forget that theatre directors are dealing with living texts. We constantly adapt, chop, cut and change to make the text vibrant and rigorous for a modern audience, to present our particular vision in as limpid a way as possible.
This word-salad has the distinct flavor of a man trying to convince himself of something he knows not to be true, like an alcoholic persuading himself that it is fine for him to drink a liter of vodka a day because he only drinks it from miniatures. Islamic opinion, now a very strong lobbying force in the United Kingdom, is not as interested in vibrant and rigorous texts as it is in the chopping and cutting part, Islamic style. Now, almost two decades after this piece of theatrical caution, Islamic responses to perceived insults or religious slights are serious enough for an English mother to be forced to apologize to a hall full of Muslims because her 14-year-old autistic son had accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran at school. The boy himself received death threats and was forced into hiding.
The burning of the Koran in public had a revival in Scandinavia last year, and Nordic Muslims were predictably unimpressed. Book-burning is generally the ultimate excess of literary criticism, although Muslims are probably not so much concerned by critical theory as the insult to their religion. And these things have a way of escalating. When the Nazis burned Freud’s books, he remarked to Jung it would be his books today and him tomorrow. Now, although the roles are reversed from Freud’s perspective, artists and media producers are respectful of Islam, and for good reason. It’s the one that artist Grayson Perry gave when asked why he shied away from criticizing Islam in his work, but was happy to do so with Christianity. He didn’t, he said, want his head cut off.
Creative types are very aware of the fate of Salman Rushdie, who was attacked and stabbed repeatedly by a Muslim while giving a reading in 2022. It was an assault that cost Rushdie an eye, and was also revenge very much served cold. The attack was a response to The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s novel deemed blasphemous across the Muslim world and published over 35 years before Rushdie was stabbed. 2005, the year of Tamburlaine, also saw the Danish cartoon protests, in which Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Mohammed with predictable results. These protests would mutate into the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015. The French satirical magazine featured a cartoon of Mohammed on its cover, and the Islamic critical response was a visit to their offices by gunmen who killed 12 staff members. Thus, it is easy to see why artists decide against bearding the Islamic lion. But, as English teachers used to say of particularly naughty children, there’s always one, isn’t there?
In this case, one film in particular ran the risk of being seen to mock Islam, and looks an even more courageous statement set in the context mentioned. Most films about the various aspects of Islamic terrorism are understandably grim affairs, but 2010’s Four Lions was a comedy, albeit a very black one. It was written and directed by an English satirist who may be new to American readers: Chris Morris.
Morris began his career with a radio show on Greater London Radio (GLR) in the 1990s. A mixture of his Catholic musical tastes, rapier-sharp wit, and surreal humor made him part of a brilliant trio of Englishmen on GLR, along with Chris Evans and Danny Baker, and he covered the Sunday morning hangover slot. I wonder if there is anything remotely comparable now that would keep me tuned to the same station for two unbroken hours at the weekend, because this was very good radio. It featured bizarre street interviews with a baffled public intertwined with prank phone calls live on air, and Morris’ slightly off-kilter use of language kept you listening to the current sentence while working out what the last one meant. Moreover, the playlist would veer from the Pixies to country and western. Morris knew how to play his radio audience expertly, and his move into television was inspired.
The Day Today was a spoof news show centered on items which mimicked real news delivery but featured absurd topics. “Big-faced child used as satellite dish,” Morris would announce deadpan to camera, or “What next for man raised by puffins?” Financial expert Collaterly Sisters informed us that the portrait of the Queen was to be removed from bank notes and replaced with an image of Iggy Pop. Political reporter Michael O’Hanraha-hanrahan [sic] would be ritually humiliated on air in each episode. The show also kick-started the career of Steve Coogan and his character Alan Partridge, an over-friendly and incompetent sports reporter. As the camera at a horse-racing meeting roams over the crowds and lingers on some children, Partridge muses in his jolly radio voice:
A couple of youngsters there fooling around. Let’s hope that tomfoolery doesn’t escalate into blind, ugly violence which, let’s face it, none of us wants to see.
The show worked not because it satirized the great and the good — that would come later — but because it satirized the media itself. But in case the great and the good were feeling left out, Morris made up for that with his next project, Brass Eye. Only six episodes of this series were made, but the controversy generated was exponential. Each episode was a documentary on a controversial topic such as drugs or pornography, but it was the half-hour special on pedophilia that went very close to the edge of what was acceptable and then just kept going. In one segment, a pedophile with his head and hands fastened in a set of Medieval-style stocks is interviewed by an irate and disgusted Morris. The hapless kiddy-fiddler (as the English have been known to call pedophiles) is played by Simon Pegg, who may be familiar from Shaun of the Dead and elsewhere. Morris presents his young son to Pegg, who has been defending “inter-generational sex.” “So,” booms Morris, “you’re telling me that you want to have sex with my young son!” Pegg replies that he does not, and a slightly offended Morris asks why not. Pegg says apologetically, “I just don’t fancy him.”
This and the rest of the episode rattled some serious cages when it aired in 1997. Now, when culture is taking a dark shift when it comes to sex with children and what have been termed “minor-attracted persons,” pedophilia gets a pass among the strange psyches of some members of the woke generation. In 1997 it was still the great taboo.
The outcry over Brass Eye was exacerbated by the fact that celebrities and politicians were regularly twitted on camera by Morris. My favorite was the bumptious Paul Boateng, a black Member of Parliament who was tricked into discussing a fictional DJ called Herman the Tosser. In the pedophile special, Phil Collins was fooled into wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a fictional anti-pedophile organization called “Nonce Sense.” In case that term hasn’t made it across the Atlantic, a “nonce” is a convicted pedophile. Such men do not fare well in jail.
After Brass Eye, the pedophilia episode being the second most complained-about show in British broadcasting history, Morris went on to produce more high-quality, cult TV. He co-wrote Nathan Barley, a series featuring a young hipster (long before hipsters) in a pre-woke world of independent media and absurd and twisted cool. It was astutely prescient by predicting “the rise of the idiots” we see today. He also acted in The IT Crowd, another success and set among computer nerds, and wrote and directed the dark series Jam. But it was Morris’ film debut, 2010’s Four Lions, that took risk-taking to a level rarely seen in British cinema, and Morris brings the same language skills to the film he honed on radio and TV, as well as a topic that seemed unsuitable for both comedy and British Islam.
The movie follows five (despite the film’s title) Muslim men, four of Pakistani heritage plus the obligatory white misfit who has converted. After visiting a training camp in Pakistan, the terror cell’s leader, Omar, and his educationally subnormal sidekick Waj are sent back home in disgrace after a hopeless display culminating in Omar trying to take down an American drone with a rocket launcher, but unfortunately shouldering it the wrong way round and taking out fellow mujahideen on a nearby hillside. One of the victims of this mishap is brilliantly revealed in the film’s closing credits. On returning to the United Kingdom, Omar lies and tells the rest of the cell that they have a mission, sanctioned by an emir, and all that remained was to choose their target. The sheer stupidity of Waj and Faisal, as well as the bullish devotion to jihad of fat convert Barry, exasperate Omar.
In interviews at the time of the film’s release, Morris was erudite and informative about the creative process that led to the risk-laden idea for the film, while casually dismissing the potential for controversy and Islamic punishment. Refreshingly, he doesn’t share the insistence of many comedians being interviewed on having to be funny all the time, and so he keeps his comic powder dry to use in his work. Analyzing the obvious contradictions and paradoxes of making a comedy about terrorists who plan to slaughter innocent people, Morris often returns to a news story about five Yemenis who planned to sink an American warship by ramming it with a boat full of explosives. They stacked the homemade bombs in the boat and it promptly sank. This started Morris thinking. These five guys have just seen their glorious jihad sink through their own stupidity. A horrified silence follows. Which of them speaks first, and what does he say? This was the seed that grew into Four Lions, so titled as the name “Osama” means “Lion.”
The humor in the film is very English, and filled with signature Morris non-sequiturs. As Barry the convert is loading nails into a nail bomb, dedicating each one to a different target, he lists his potential victims: “Some random bloke. Some slag. Leonard Cohen.”
Some scenes are strangely moving in the context of the subject matter, not least when Omar is discussing his coming self-detonation and martyrdom along with his wife and small son as calmly as they would discuss a family holiday. There is a psychological twitch to the bombers, the cognitive dissonance produced by what they are doing playing on their faces. They see the idealized curtain of jihad but the knowledge of what it means in real terms keeps providing unwelcome glimpses behind that curtain. Some lines are tragically perfect.
James Joyce is reputed to have walked into his local pub one evening beaming with happiness. “You must have written a lot today, James,” said the barman. “I wrote one sentence,” said the writer. “But what a sentence!” Occasionally, lines from a film have the same pedigree, worth the entrance money by themselves. In Four Lions, the terrorists are sweltering in their comedy costumes as they prepare to run the London Marathon, the chosen target for their explosive jihad. They are pretending to be running for charity, but are all wearing suicide vests hidden under their outfits. A police officer observes jovially, “You’re going to die in those costumes, lads.” Omar looks at him wistfully and replies, “It’s all for a good cause.”
The result of this culturally risky move was that Morris attracted far more heat for Brass Eye than he did for Four Lions. And not only did he avoid Islamic censure, young Muslims actually seemed to enjoy the film, with a Muslim Reddit commentator calling it “the British Blazing Saddles.” It is pleasing to think that Morris’ chutzpah alone allowed him to get away with portraying imbecilic Muslims trying and failing to blow people up. But it also shows that apart from the sectarianism already built into Islam, there is perhaps a new and healthy schism. Perhaps a separation exists between those younger British Muslims who can actually enjoy Western culture and attitudes without feeling the need to rape or behead anyone, and another, more politicized group. These are the Muslims who understand the West’s weakness: that it will always apologize and appease if they make enough noise about something they decide is offensive. It’s all part of the conquista.
So, it may be that had Morris been directing Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the Koran-burning scene would have stayed in not deliberately to provoke, but merely to satisfy Morris’ curiosity as to what the effect might be. A lot of his comedy centers on the effects of odd language usage and unfamiliar situations on ordinary people. Four Lions, if it has a wider message beyond its comic content, shows that a few ordinary and confused young men with the same fanatical idea can justify crimes far more heinous than the burning of books. But it also laughs at Islam, mocking Thomas Moore’s “proude spirit” — and for that, Morris deserves respect on a human level as well as an artistic one.
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3 comments
Chris Morris is one of the best satirists alive. I’ve watched Four Lions maybe 20 times. He handles “untouchable” topics better than almost anyone. This is from the “Paedogeddon” episode of Brass Eye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYkGN3p0WCU
It’s totally Mexico you rapist.
Yes, yes. Hopefully Chris Morris will someday get greater exposure like Steve Coogan did. Why did Four Lions not get Islamic censure? It may have been the lead actors families come from Islamic countries… or as simple as the film not being widely discussed in the way The Satanic Verses was.
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