The Mel Brooks sequel “History of the World: Part II” premieres on Hulu March 6, but there’s room for more than one amateur sociologist / historian / gagmeister on the planet. To wit: the British mockumentary series “Cunk on Earth,” now on Netflix. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in months, and not just on Netflix.
Some context. For a decade now, the character of oblivious television personality Philomena Cunk, finessed with indelible deadpan idiocracy by Diane Morgan, has been an increasingly 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,” “Cunk on Christmas” — 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, slightly gassy 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, the American Civil War, and what Cunk calls the “World War franchise,” which ended, we learn, with “World War Cold.” (The Berlin Wall, she explains, was “a sort of divorce made of bricks.”)
There’s a prankumentary component to this mockumentary. Morgan-as-Cunk interviews a variety of 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 as straight as possible.
Somehow this works. One after the other, the educators on view explain, patiently, to their questioner that she means “Russian peasants,” not Russian pheasants, for example. This is mainly due to the stunning, 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?” Or: “The Rolling Stones were huge in the 1960s. Would it be fair to say they were the Beatles of their day?”
There are two other reasons “Cunk on Earth” works for newcomers (like me) 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.”
But she starts further back. Ancient Greece, she notes to camera, gave us many things “we still have today, like medicine and olives, and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars.” Large-scale tragic death comes out slightly skewed here, with Cunk describing the Titanic as “the world’s first single-use submarine.” Less violently, Henry Ford’s assembly line is characterized as a key 20th century “revolution in workplace tedium and human meaninglessness.”
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 way, way back examples were literary, and Cunk has no time for books. Nor for cave paintings, or the theater, the latter of which comes in for a brilliant needling in the grim context of Lincoln’s assassination.
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. Take the iPhone, she says — so complex, yet “so simple a child can make one.”
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'CUNK ON EARTH'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA (language, some nudity)
How to watch: Netflix
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