If you were like me, raised in a household with the authority of voices of David Attenborough, Adam Curtis, Slavoj Žižek and Carl Sagan soundtracking your childhood, you will find absolute joy and undeniable hilarity in a new mockumentary series now playing on Netflix.
“Cunk on Earth” might be a play on Junk on Earth or Cock on Earth: whatever the title tries to be, the series presenter, Philomena Cunk (played by British comedian and actor Diane Morgan) is my latest pop culture obsession.
Morgan plays a pseudo-academic natural history presenter, a Very Serious Knowledge Woman identified as a “landmark documentary presenter” in the five-part, 28-minute episode show.
For someone who grew up watching documentaries commentated by old white men who had VERY IMPORTANT SOUNDING VOICES, there’s colossal relief and stupendous glee that comes from watching a woman taking the piss out of the network genre.
Morgan’s persona as Philomena Cunk is brilliant — she dresses like she belongs in the corridors of Oxford University, and her expression as she addresses the camera is one of fortified seriousness. Even as her script is completely ridiculous — “We often assume early men were stupid because they had big eyebrows and said ‘Ugg’, but in fact, they were pioneering inventorers.”
I don’t remember the last time I cackled so regularly, with such force, in a 30-minute show.
She interviews real life experts — like British archaeologist Paul Bahn, Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, “Jim” Al-Khalili, Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History, Professor Eleanor Robson and Ancient Greek expert Dr Lyndsay Coo — all of whom respond to Cunk’s earnest questions with a repressed bewilderment that deserves a spin-off show of their own.
“Was early man similar to us?” she asks archaeologist Bahn with the solemn intensity of a 60 Minutes journalist. “Was he made out of the same sort of meat that we are? Did it have a brand name like beef or pork?”
And with another expert she asks: “Have any of the cave paintings been adapted into films? Suppose they couldn’t get the rights anyway, though, could they? So there hasn’t been a cave wall that’s been like, “Oh my God, that’s an incredible story. We need to get Steven Spielberg to make this.”
Her genuine comic appeal comes from the deadpan earnestness of a child, asking an adult something about the world they don’t know about. It reminded me of the scenes in “Big” (1988) where Josh (played by Tom Hanks stuck in the body of a 13-year old) says “I don’t get it” during a serious business meeting… or the scene where he asks his colleague, “What’s a marketing report?”
Morgan pulls off this same tenor of child-like astonishment while keeping a straight face as the experts she interviews try to answer her questions in a way they’re not used to.
This series is not only stunningly hilarious, it’s also deeply comforting. Too often, I meet people who are only too keen to use big words and long sentences to explain what they do, or what they know. Most of the time, I just want to ask them to explain it to me like you would to a 5-year old.
On the occasions I have been brave enough to ask someone to do that, I’ve discovered that most people can’t. Simplifying something turns out to be much harder for adults than trying to sound smart and using big words.
British classicist Dr Nigel Spivey nabs the award for best performance (aka reaction) in the show’s pilot, when Cunk asks him about the Romans’ relationship with anal bleaching.
“I don’t even know what it is,” Dr Spivey responses innocently.
Beyond the fact of its reliable laughter-count, the show is obviously feminist — meaning, we have a woman in the role that has historically been given to men, cracking jokes about the gender-blindness of previous histories of humanity.
“Millions of young men died during the war, but fortunately, humankind had discovered a new kind of man: the woman,” she narrates in the fourth episode.
“Women had always existed in the background of history, largely being used as human pets for men, tolerated for their magical ability to excrete fresh humans through their front holes. But in the early 20th century, social scientists discovered something incredible: that a woman could do anything a man could do, without the need to talk about it.”
Moreover, the opening credit sequence features exclusively female iconography. Ah. What a relief that history is no longer making man as the default.
“Cunk of Earth” is now streaming on Netflix.