Mockumentary series dense with goofs both silly, smart
The Mel Brooks sequel “History of the World: Part II” premieres March 6 on Hulu, but there’s room for more than one amateur sociologist-historiangagmeister on the planet. To wit: the British mockumentary series “Cunk on Earth.” It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in months.
For a decade now, the character of oblivious television personality Philomena Cunk, finessed with indelible deadpan idiocracy by Diane Morgan, has been a popular TV phenom in Britain. She made her first appearance on the “Daily Show”-esque satirical news program “Weekly Wipe,” created by Charlie Brooker, who went on to do “Black Mirror.”
From those early appearances, longer BBC 2 specials were born — “Cunk on Shakespeare,” “Cunk on Britain” — in addition to book spinoffs. “Cunk on Earth” presents five half-hour segments purporting to survey the whole of human history, inventions, accomplishments and follies. It adds up to an alternate-reality, fact-optional version of David Attenborough’s scenic chin-strokers, a la “A Life on Our Planet.”
The episodes carry titles such as “Faith/Off ” (in which Cunk sets out to determine what’s better, the Bible or the Koran) and “The Renaissance Will Not Be Televised.” Later episodes address, among other topics, what Cunk calls the “World War franchise,” which ended, we learn, with “World War Cold.”
There’s a prankumentary component to this mockumentary. Cunk interviews history, sociology and cultural anthropology scholars who, as opposed to the guinea pigs duped into participation by Sacha Baron Cohen’s
Ali G or Borat, were told in advance about the nature of the project and were asked to play it straight.
Somehow, this works. One after the other, the educators explain to their questioner that she means “Russian peasants,” not “Russian pheasants,” for example. This is mainly due to the straight-faced confidence Morgan brings to a character she knows outside in by now. Sample inquiry: “Why are pyramids that shape? Is it to stop homeless people from sleeping on them?”
There are two other reasons “Cunk on Earth” works for newcomers to Morgan’s signature creation. One is the sheer volume and impressive hit-to-miss ratio of the jokes, never forced or underlined by Morgan or director Christian Watt.
The other is making Cunk a flexible, sneakily insightful kind of dolt. One minute she’s mislabeling Karl Marx’s seminal work as “The Commonest Man in Festo”; the next, she’s discussing art and culture and how “for decades, pioneering Black artists had steadily built on each other’s work to develop an exciting new musical form for white people to pass off as their own.”
Goofing on history, and the way middle-highbrow popular culture repackages that history for delicious comic leftovers, predates Stan Freberg’s “United States of America Volume One: The
Early Years” (1961) by a century or more. But those examples were literary, and Cunk has no time for books. Film, at least, she says at one point in “Cunk on Earth,” has this in its favor: It spelled the end of “the written word’s centurieslong era of tyranny.” That’s a good stupid jest. Cunk has good smart ones in her arsenal as well.
Content rating: TV-MA (for language and some nudity) Running time: 5 episodes, about 2.5 hours total
How to watch: Netflix