Philomena Cunk’s 21st-century expertise

“The ancient Greeks had lots of things that we still have today, like medicine and olives, and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars,” Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) intones sagely, without a hint of irony. Cunk is the fictional host of the fictional history documentary Cunk on Earth (a joint BBC Two/Netflix production, streaming on Netflix), which promises to explain “how humanity transformed our planet” in five brief episodes that move from the emergence of Homo sapiens to the invention of the iPhone in less than three hours.

I’ve been a fan of Cunk since a friend turned me on to some of her earlier BBC comedy specials, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare, and Cunk and Other Humans, all of which are easy to find on YouTube. One of Morgan’s specialties as a comedian is interviewing her academic and expert guests. Because Cunk is by now a well-known character in British comedy, her guests do their level best to remain straight-faced regardless of the questions she asks them. But it is clear they have no idea where these interviews are going, and Morgan pushes each of them to the limits of their professionalism, producing some truly hilarious looks of wide-eyed astonishment as they try to process what she is saying.

“After he died, Jesus came back to earth in the form of a book, didn’t he?” she asks an earnest Bible scholar. “Why do Christians call that special book the Bible?”—pronouncing it “bibble.” When the scholar gently corrects her, she looks perplexed, as though sounding out a foreign word. “Is that how it’s pronounced? I’ve literally never heard anyone say it before. How do you say it again?”