Are suicide bombers good for a laugh? Shocking news pictures from Moscow last week would suggest not. In this context, a terrorism comedy sounds like not only a contradiction, but a complete outrage – and the man for the job has to be Chris Morris.

The envelope-pushing comedian and writer has just made his big-screen directing debut with Four Lions, a film about a cell of jihadist would-be bombers from Sheffield. That he is tackling a subject most other comics wouldn't touch with a barge pole won't come as any surprise to fans of The Day Today, or Brass Eye – just two of many successful comedy series written and presented by Morris. He's part of that darker cabal of writers which includes Armando Iannucci, Patrick Marber and Steve Coogan. But the taboo-breaking Morris walks a riskier comedic tightrope than his peers, ridiculing moral panic and fake sentiment through spoof news reports and documentaries for over a decade. The writer Will Self described hoaxed victims as having been "driven up the warped garden path of Morris's contempt".

The comedian has repeatedly exposed the willingness of celebrities to talk rubbish if it enhances a solicitous image. On one episode of Brass Eye, he persuaded well-known figures such as Noel Edmonds to pontificate to the British nation of the dangers of an utterly fictitious recreational drug called "Cake". A Conservative MP was so taken in by Morris he even brought the issue of "Cake" up at Question Time in the House of Commons. But when it was all revealed as nonsense, Morris was subsequently fired by Channel Four.

Morris claims he's not being provocative simply for shock effect. "If you make a joke in an area which is, for some reason, normally random, out of bounds, then you might find something out, you might put your finger on something," he has said.

It's not often the 44-year-old feels the need to explain himself. Nor does he actively court publicity. But in the rare interviews he gives, "the most loathed man on television" (as critics once dubbed him) is consistently described as charming and cheerful in person, usually dressed in donnish garb of smart-shabby clothes, and even sporting a bow-tie on occasion. He lives in Brixton, London, with literary agent Jo Unwin and their two sons, Charles and Frederick. His chosen university course in his native Bristol may, or may not, have inspired his take on the human condition – he studied zoology. After graduation, a brief stint in local radio came to an abrupt end because he kept adding his own commentaries over serious news bulletins.

But he turned the sacking offence on its head by developing spoof news programme On The Hour on BBC Radio Four – the show that introduced Radio Norwich's bumbling Alan Partridge to the world. The TV version, The Day Today, followed. The formula was a spoof of current affairs shows that was both surreal and bitingly satirical: Morris broke 'news items' with headlines such as "Bouncing elephantitis woman destroys central Portsmouth", while bafflingly obtuse 'economic reports' were introduced with lines like "And now the outlook for the markets: slightly fractious in the nines and sevens."

But the laughter became nervous when he chose paedophilia as the subject matter for a 2001 episode of Brass Eye. When the baseball bats came out, his defence was that the show targeted hysterical media reporting, not innocent victims. It became the second-most complained-about programme in Independent Television history (the first being the screening of Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ).

The idea for Four Lions struck when Morris read about a terrorist plot to blow up a US warship: "In the dead of night, with their target moored just offshore, the cell assembled at the quayside, slipped their boat into the water and stacked it with explosives. It sank. I laughed."

For research, he sat in on terrorist-related court cases, discovering that extremism can contain elements of farce: "They turn up at training camps wearing the wrong clothes. They argue about who's cooler – Bin Laden or Johnny Depp."

Morris has displayed characteristic bravado in choosing a subject so potentially explosive. He's not expecting a fatwa to be issued, but accepts there will be offence taken, although "the people likely to be shocked or offended are only those who haven't seen the film". It's not racist, it's not attacking a culture, he says, "but just may be suggesting that killing people is not a good idea. A cell of terrorists is a bunch of blokes. Fired-up lads planning cosmic war from a bedsit. You don't have to mock Islamic beliefs to make a joke out of someone who wants to run the world under sharia law – but can't apply it in his own home because his wife won't let him."

Hero or Villain? Chris Morris

High: Exposing the eagerness of unsuspecting celebrities to stoke up moral panic on spoof campaigns such as that for the 'drug' Cake – "It stimulates the part of the brain called Shatner's Bassoon"

Low: The deluge of complaints after the Brass Eye special on paedophilia – government ministers who criticised it later admitted they hadn't actually watched the programme