'You may laugh ..." People are fond of beginning sentences with these words when they mean quite the opposite. What follows tends to suggest that you really may not laugh at all. You may laugh, a person might say, but she's having it amputated next week. You may laugh, but the smell will never come out of that carpet.

I recently found myself tacitly reprimanded in this way after it had emerged that the chaps accused of crashing that environmentally unfriendly Jeep Cherokee into Glasgow airport had failed to measure the width of said sports utility vehicle, resulting in its not being able to get through the doors, as they are alleged to have intended it to. For heaven's sake, I said to an acquaintance. It's not exactly brain surgery.

Not five minutes later, it emerged that one of the suspects is in fact a brain surgeon.

Blimey, I gabbled on. You wouldn't want to be a former patient of his today, waking up and discovering that some guy who can't master a tape measure was the one tinkering around with your synapses a few months ago. You'd be marching straight back in and demanding to be opened up again. I want every piece of that halfwit's work checked over, you'd be screaming, by someone who's at least familiar with basic fricking metric units of distance.

You may laugh, my acquaintance replied, but think of the carnage they could have caused.

What a brilliant point, I was tempted to respond in the drippingly sarcastic tone normally reserved for discussions with the council's parking suspensions department. Do you know, until you said it, the thought simply hadn't occurred. After all, it's not as if one has spent much of the last six years dreading the advent of every news bulletin, on account of the fact that some fresh hell will have opened up somewhere in the world, and Hieronymus Boschean visions of whatever human misery is playing out in it will be beamed straight into one's living room, causing one's increasingly terrified self to wonder whether 9am is too early for a drink if one promises to include a mixer. Do excuse my failure to glimpse the bigger picture.

I didn't say this, alas. I took my rebuke. And this week, as the July 21 bomb plot trial came to an end, I suspect similar censure will attend any attempt to prick the sheer common or garden pomposity of your average terrorist. The discovery that most kitchen cabinets contain products capable of destroying an underground train is obviously hideous. But when some despicable bungler fails to detonate their chapatti flour, it is apparently not OK to mark either one's relief, or one's anger at this vile creature, by taking the mickey.

This blanket po-facedness can't be right. George Bush is fair game, but these idiots aren't? If seriousness is insisted upon, then one can seriously argue that it is precisely this sort of misplaced reverence that allows a murderer to become a soldier, or a freedom fighter, in the popular imagination.

Yet there is so much to find absurd. Consider, for instance, all those al-Qaida training videos. Why do wannabe terrorists bother scrambling on their tummies under all those rope nets in the shadow of the Hindu Kush? No disrespect, but all their eventual mission will involve is setting fire to their trainers in an aisle seat once the captain has switched the seatbelts sign off and the crew have commenced their in-flight service. Seems an awful waste of a fortnight in Pakistan to have spent it practising for some Junior Action Man contest that will never happen. The 72 virgins are guaranteed. You don't need to get all buff to attract them.

For a perfect example of the importance of mick-taking, we need look no further than Team America: World Police, the screamingly funny puppet movie by the creators of South Park, which in keeping with the latter TV show really strives for equal opportunities offensiveness. The film manages to insult everyone from the US government to Hans Blix, lefty Hollywood actors to people who really respect the musical Rent, and Kim Jong-il ... Oh, Kim Jong-il! I now can't see a picture of the Dear Leader without hearing him speak in the same voice as South Park's Cartman, screeching such gems as "When you see Arec Barrwin, you see the true ugriness of human nature!"

It doesn't make the old boy seem any less dangerous. But it removes his aura of what you might call evil dignity, the veneer that attaches itself to our real-life bad guys unless we laugh at them.

The worst thing we can do is confuse such debunking with a lack of respect for the victims of terrorism. Rather, it is a refusal to dignify the common criminals who killed them. Poking fun at terrorists is far more than gallows humour, valuable though that wonderfully human device is in times of such dehumanising danger. It is possible to simultaneously acknowledge how vile and dangerous these would-be murderers are, but to avoid flattering them with the kind of reverence you'd afford bleeding Delta Force. We may laugh. And we should.



marina.hyde@theguardian.com