Mockumentary inquisitor Philomena Cunk returns in hilarious new series, Cunk on Earth, grilling and confusing experts to tell the entire story of Human Civilisation from prehistoric times to the present day. We turned to Amelia Berry’s expertise in an effort to explain Cunk’s comedic appeal.
Cunk on Earth: Season 1
With Cunk on Earth now streaming on Netflix, us Antipodeans finally have access to a comedy phenomenon once restricted to the British, anglophiles, and the especially lonely. But who is Philomena Cunk? And what makes this ingeniously idiotic take-off of big brained BBC documentaries just about the funniest thing you can stream right now?
“Why do they say it’s a mystery how the pyramids were built, when it’s obviously just big bricks in a triangle?” Cunk on Ancient Egypt
Well, to answer the first question, Philomena Cunk is a sort of… Bolton Borat. Or maybe, Simon Scharma if he was a belligerent ginger woman who got the majority of her information from Coffee News and comments on YouTube. In real world terms, Philomena Cunk is a fictional woman-in-the-street turned media personality and documentary host, played by comedian and actor Diane Morgan.
You might recognise Morgan from her recent roles in Motherland or After Life, but she’s been kicking around in the UK comedy scene for a couple of decades, showing up in Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights way back in 2002, her own series Mandy, and in a long-running double act with Joe Wilkinson called Two Episodes of Mash (for the one of you who watched it, that was them doing the sketches in Robert Webb’s short-lived internet comedy showcase Robert’s Web).
The Philomena Cunk character herself first showed up as a talking head in Charlie Brooker’s satirical news show Weekly Wipe in 2013, offering comedically naive takes on everything from the Harlem Shake to horrific UK reality show Benefits Street with her male counterpart, Barry Shitpeas (Weekly Wipe director Al Campbell).
While Cunk and Shitpeas had a certain ‘white van man’ charm as interviewees, it was when Weekly Wipe gave Philomena her own mini-documentary segment, Moments of Wonder, that the Cunk magic really came together, giving her the perfect platform to turn received wisdom totally ridiculous through sheer po-faced matter-of-factness
“So, if there wasn’t police we’d be able to do what we liked, which is great. But then the police wouldn’t get to do what they liked – which is be the police – and that’d be against their human rights.” Cunk on Police
Crucially, Moments of Wonder gave Cunk the chance to talk (in character) to real life academics, experts, and public intellectuals. Asking the big questions like “who are you?”, “what do you mean?”, and “will there ever come a time when we need two mouses to use a computer?”, Morgan’s deadpan incredulity draws out some truly incredible answers from the blindsided academics.
It’s a niche of comedy that seems to be having a bit of a moment. With Nathan Fielder’s mesmerising The Rehearsal becoming something of a cultural phenomenon, and the critical reappraisal of Sacha Baron Cohen’s work following Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, there’s never been a better time to be a weird made-up guy having satirically revealing conversations with real people.
Of course, there’s nothing new about exploiting real people’s reactions to bizarre situations, Candid Camera started on TV in 1948 and even before that it was on radio as The Candid Microphone. Being a bit of an oblivious doofus is an even older comedy trope, and you can bet that way before Laurel and Hardy, or Shakespeare’s Falstaff, there was some neolithic comedian who could guarantee a laugh from slipping on some wheat chaff and saying “woops!”
This current batch, cleverly using its dimwitted characters to combine prank and satire, goes back to a couple of British comedy shows in the late 90s; The 11 O’Clock Show and Brass Eye.
Before Borat, Sasha Baron Cohen’s bread and butter was Ali G, and Ali G’s first outing was The 11 O’Clock Show, chatting with professors and politicians as a kind of chavvy proto-Cunk. Hitting the screens a year earlier, Brass Eye saw ChrisMorris pivot from satirising TV news with The Day Today to taking on long-form journalism programmes à la 60 Minutes. A big part of this was incorporating real life celebrities and politicians into interviews and fake public campaigns (Get Cake off our streets and stop Czech Neck!).
With Charlie Brooker getting his start writing for Brass Eye, and later working with Chris Morris on the sitcom Nathan Barley, it’s pretty clear that Cunk is firmly a part of this same legacy, smuggling satire through wide-eyed banality and puncturing media-personality posturing by catching them off-guard with idiocy. Whether the Emeritus Professor of Whatever smiles and nods along or starts acting like they’re talking to a particularly irritating toddler, the results are surefire crack-up.
“Is that in this episode or will that come up later? …which episode are we in now? …yeah but is it episode three or episode four? …we’re both just lost here aren’t we? This is fuckin’ awful.” Cunk on The Dark Ages
So, from Moments of Wonder, Cunk has spun off into special after series after special, from Cunk on Christmas to Cunk on Shakespeare, and now Cunk on Earth. A kind of potted history of humanity from cave paintings to the threat of nuclear war, in five half-hour episodes Cunk on Earth will have you looking sideways at Adam Curtis and thinking twice about Kenneth Clarke’s credentials.
Driven by Morgan’s performance, and Weekly Wipe writers Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley, and Joel Morris (now largely led by Hazeley), a decade in, Philomena Cunk has become one of British comedy’s stupidest and most enduring voices and now, finally, you can find out why.
