Armando Iannucci sharpened his rapier wit on British radio and television in the 1990s. He helped pen seminal shows such as the surreal news program takeoff, “On the Hour,” and the kaleidoscopic talk show “Knowing Me, Knowing You…with Alan Partridge” starring Steve Coogan. By the aughts, he’d moved behind the camera and in 2005, he directed, produced and co-wrote the masterful BBC political satire, “The Thick of It.” Filmed in an intimate hand-held camera, documentary style, the six episodes and subsequent two hour-long specials cudgeled the duplicitous machinations of a fictitious government department and, by inference, the entire British bureaucratic infrastructure. With “In the Loop,” his first feature film, Iannucci, in a sequel of sorts, mines familiar political territory with a similar visual technique, but sweeps his unmerciless satiric scythe across the Atlantic in this profane and wickedly funny send-up.

Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, but think Oxbridge Patton Oswalt) is a befuddled fop of a Cabinet Minister who is Secretary of State for International Development. During a radio interview, he utters one misguided word. This single utterance from this doltish Minister, who is not so much a tabula rasa as an Etch A Sketch, sparks a farcical march to war in the Middle East. He becomes a key figure but, essentially, a figurehead for both galvanizing sides of the debate in the UK and the U.S., played by an ensemble cast of pitch-perfect portrayals (including Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky, Paul Higgins, Mimi Kennedy, and James Gandolfini particularly pungently foul-mouthed as Lt. General George Miller).

But no one hounds Foster more doggedly than Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s vituperative king of spin. Played by the tremendous Peter Capaldi, who resembles a psychopathic meerkat and reprises his role from “The Thick of It,” Tucker is vicious, venomous and unerringly crude. He masticates his unceasing insults, spitting them out at anyone who deigns to speak in his presence so that every vile slur from the Scotsman’s lips seems flecked with spittle; he not so much wishes to dent their dignity as he wants to resect their self esteem. Linton Barwick is Tucker’s American counterpart but exudes an antithetical public demeanor. Smooth, powerful and undetected, like a Long Island Ice Tea, Barwick (a slithery suave David Rasche, “Sledge Hammer”) is a Brooks Brothers-clad, Machiavellian philosopher as he prepares to manipulate a United Nations presentation that mimics Colin Powell’s February 2003 performance. “In the land of truth, the man with one fact is king,” Barwick boasts as the hoax is hatched. In the midst of this international intrigue, Foster must return to his constituency for a town meeting in Northampton where the most pressing issue is a constituent’s crumbling wall. (Steve Coogan turns in a devilishly understated performance as the disgruntled Midlands neighbor whose cause becomes a national sensation, and an embarrassment for Foster.)

With “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” and “Real Time with Bill Maher,” audiences have been exposed to politicians’ opportunistic contradictions and prevaricating spin on an almost quotidian basis. The Orwellian jig is up. We’ve caught on. But Iannucci still scathingly captures the systemic deceit and narcissistic self preservation in an exciting, clever and unrelenting narrative buoyed by a hilarious script spewing with lusty wordplay and robust invective. However, the comedy in “In the Loop” is tinged with the melancholy realization that so long as the upper echelon of power is inhabited by, and rewards the disingenuous, then, in the words of T.E. Lawrence from “Lawrence of Arabia, “so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel.”