Certain artists establish such a niche for themselves that they become journalistic shorthand for a certain category. For Chris Morris, the satirist behind The Day Today and Brass Eye, the category is the absurdity of modern media culture: these days, coverage of the latest reality-TV inanity or tranche of government-issued gobbledygook is pretty likely to include an accompanying note of surprise that Morris wasn't involved. From the man himself, however, there has been barely a peep since Nathan Barley aired on Channel 4 in 2005: a cameo on The IT Crowd here, a report from the Cern Large Hadron Collider there.

Those paying close attention, though, will know that Morris has been at work for several years on a project that marks something of a departure for him in formal terms (it's a feature film) if not in his proclivity for provocative subject matter: Four Lions is a comedy about suicide bombers. Which isn't to say he is taking jihad lightly: he has embarked on serious research, talking to everyone from police and security experts to imams and Muslim community workers. (There was also a public spat with Martin Amis along the way.)

On the set of Chris Morris's Four Lions

Morris's conclusion, according to the film's producers, Warp Films, is that it's a daft as well as a deadly business. "Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce," the company has said. "At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other's feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking … Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it's also about berks." Morris's project, they maintain, "understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous."

A still from Chris Morris's Four Lions

Made with funding from Film4, Four Lions includes writing from Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. It was partly shot on the streets of Sheffield – this amateur picture shows Kevin Eldon as an armed police officer – and at one point locations in the Alps were being scouted to double for terrorist training camps. Official stills released this week seem to be from such scenes. With editing on the film under way, Warp reports that "its small tornado of industry is now trapped and humming in a box". It will be intriguing, to say the least, to see what emerges when that box is eventually opened.