Print Version - Click here to return to the normal view. Print it!

Satire and ridicule as a weapon? Who knew?

Uh… we did.

But a bunch of eggheads quoted by Agence France-Presse are getting some ink because they put out a report that says the battle against al-quaeda must include ridicule and satire as much as predator drones and bullets.

Terrorism must be defeated through the deliberate ‘toxification’ of the al-Qaeda brand; not by making it seem dangerous, but by exposing it as dumb,” Jamie Bartlett, one of the report’s authors, told AFP.

“Al-Qaeda has to be ridiculed as the equivalent of a middle-aged dad at a school disco: enthusiastic, incompetent and excruciatingly uncool.

Maybe this will catch on among British comics. (Indeed, it may already be all the rage to make al quaeda jokes in Brit clubs.) Over here, the jokes seem to be directed mainly at those who are/have been fighting terror– Aschcroft, Bush, the TSA, et al– and not the terrorists themselves.

There’s a British movie, “Four Lions,” coming out next month about a group of bumbling al quaeda terrorist. It made a big splash at Sundance and it opens in the U.K. on May 7, but it has yet to find a U.S. distributor from what we can tell. What was that about Hollywood being so courageous? Where is this generation’s Charlie Chaplin?