Absurdism, as Thomas Nagel argues, comes from the “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (718). Absurdist comedy, then, follows the incongruity model, placing in conflict the deadly serious with the chaotic and meaningless. It is the difference between a truck full of explosives and the four idiots driving it.
The Four Lions follows four “homegrown jihadists” who plan to bomb the London Marathon and find themselves foiled at every junction by their own ineptitude. In this clip, the men are in the process of driving their homemade explosives from the Yorkshire town in which they live to London. The humor in this scene (and film) arises from Nagel’s claim that the pretension which runs up against reality often comes from self-aspiration or the tendency for human beings to take themselves exceedingly seriously. The Lions’ conviction is starkly juxtaposed with their playfulness, revealing the truth behind their commitment to their cause. When, later in the film, they are easily apprehended by the police, it provides a natural conclusion to the conflict between self-pretension and the reality of their abilities.
As the Lions’ driving soundtrack shifts from nasheeds to Toploader’s cover of Dancing in the Moonlight, so too does the aspiration of their political and ideological goal run headlong into their reality—at heart, they are disillusioned, angry young men, disappointed in the way that their country has treated them and searching for meaning in their predicament. Nagel addresses the role of service to a cause such as this in his definition of absurdism, ultimately concluding that there is no “conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise” and that absurdism contrasts “the pretensions of life with a larger context in which no standards can be discovered, rather than with a context from which alternative, overriding standards may be applied” (722). The Lions’ slow realization over the course of the film that their war has been meaningless, their ideologies diluted by their cultural landscape and their own lack of desire to truly harm others to further their cause, is their bleakly comic way of running up against this discrepancy. They claim to be lions, but find that they are just people.