Everybody remembers where they were. As the second plane slammed into the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 the entire world sat up and paid attention to a new global narrative flickering into life. A generation in search of its defining moment had found it. Terrorism had arrived in the 21st century.
Almost 10 years later and a young Muslim man is attempting to attach explosives to a crow with the intention of training it to fly into buildings. The man whispers softly to the bird that it will be a martyr to the cause of Islam, before tiptoeing away as it detonates in a cloud of feathers.
The setting is not, of course, a training camp in Pakistan but a scene in the Chris Morris film Four Lions, a comedy about four wannabe suicide bombers. The story follows their trials and tribulations as they attempt to blow up the London Marathon. Or a mosque. They can't decide which.
There will be many who say that the film trivialises terrorism and its tragic consequences. There will also be a few publicity-hungry charlatans who will make loud and wholly unrepresentative noises about the wrath of Islam and burning down Chris Morris's house. The rest of us will get on with living in our generally bomb-free streets and judge the film on its merits and failings. Most of us, Muslim or not, will laugh.
In making Four Lions, Morris has cut through the rampant media hysteria and paranoia in the west of the post-9/11 era. He has done this not by setting up a tipi on Threadneedle Street, or by making a sneering documentary superimposed with images of George W Bush eating babies. He has done it with intelligent humour.
For too long, the prevailing mixture of cultural sensitivity and politically correct paranoia has prevented the British public from tackling the subject of terrorism with its characteristic wit and down-to-earth realism. We have been sandwiched uncomfortably between the caricatured, bogeyman image of the fundamentalist Muslim on the one side and the liberty-grasping, risk-inflating state on the other.
Our literature, news media and popular culture abound with dystopian portrayals of the terrorism-fuelled misery of our past, present and future. We "tut" at documentaries about Camp X-Ray, cringe at photos of abuse in Abu Ghraib and wallow in hysteria generated by the headlines of the sensationalist press. We have acquiesced to increasingly invasive security measures and look set to yield to still more. Yet only a handful of us are ever likely to have our lives touched by the tragedy of a terror attack. And no, I don't mean a crying-into-your-hummus-oh-how-bloody-awful kind of touched, I mean losing a loved one.
True, we occasionally titter at Shappi Khorsandi, Marcus Brigstocke or cult gems such as the BBC's Monkey Dust (to which Morris may owe a debt of inspiration) but we have not yet considered terrorists as ordinary human beings who do ordinary, inane and puerile things, just like us. Edgy gags and clever puns may distract us with a giggle, but they don't show us the human story in the way that cinema can. This kind of understanding is crucial to how we perceive the people who commit these acts. Not as rampant antichrists, chanting in tongues beneath a pointed beard, but as ordinary British people who do one extraordinary thing.
It's part of our landscape, something that we can't just push aside and pretend happens only in the mountains of Waziristan. The scaremongers are right in one way, there are people among us who wish to bring death and destruction to a high street near you. The good news is that they're mostly bungling idiots like you, me, and the characters in Four Lions – that's funny. Just occasionally, a few will succeed, with tragic consequences – that's not. It's about time that we learned the difference.
Don't get me wrong, terror attacks bring about appalling suffering and tragedy, and the victims deserve respect and sympathy. Yet we cannot allow their suffering to be in the name of more hate and more fear. If that means piquing the sensibilities of some of the public then so be it.
We have been cowed and frightened into believing that the concept of Islamic terrorism itself is an overarching threat to civilisation, masterminded by evil geniuses who never smile, never mess about and never humorously chide their mates for what they're wearing or the way that they speak. If we allow this vision to become the dominant view then we feed the myopic hatred of groups such as the English Defence League and the British National Party. So, too, we loosen the reins on the governmental hawks who would prosecute controversial and damaging wars in the name of fighting terrorism.
Intelligent, thoughtful and funny works such as Four Lions bring us closer to understanding the human face of terrorism, and allow us to laugh off the hyperinflated nonsense that's been peddled for years. They show us the difference between the impenetrable, terrifying illusion and the gloriously flawed, human reality. If there is a greater source for comedy than the failings of human beings then I have yet to see it.
So more laughter, please. In this case it really is the best medicine.