Diane Morgan in Cunk on Cinema —Netflix

In the future, when some documentary series in whatever medium succeeds television looks back at the current decade in public discourse, it might name our era the Age of Ignorance. The crank shouting nonsense from atop a soapbox is, of course, nothing new. What’s unique to our time is how vast the audiences for these bloviators have become. We’ve got Alix Earle, with about 15 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, bragging about never having read a book. (Even if it wasn’t strictly true, how telling that she would let us believe it.) We’ve got Joe Rogan, by many measures the most popular podcaster out there—a guy who has platformed pandemic misinformation and had to apologize for using racial slurs—influencing nationwide elections. Just last week, Fox News star turned YouTuber Tucker Carlson entertained the possibility that the Smithsonian is suppressing evidence of the existence of Goliath-like giants.

To which Philomena Cunk says: “Hold my snake oil.” The world-famous British TV presenter described by the Guardian as “iconically stupid” is back on Netflix and BBC Two with Cunk on Cinema, a six-part docuseries in which she gripes that reading subtitles makes it impossible to concentrate on one’s phone and pronounces D.W. Griffith’s KKK mash note The Birth of a Nation a “typically woke Hollywood fantasy.” (In what may or may not be a nod to viewers’ short attention spans, episodes top out at 15 minutes and can be binged in less time than it takes to watch most films.) Cunk is so incompetent, it’s hilarious. But unlike the personalities listed above, she’s meant to be funny—because she is a fictional character played by Diane Morgan. And although she was conceived when Earle was a tween and Carlson had bosses to answer to, she has since become the perfect fake newswoman to send up our Age of Ignorance.

She may not be a real human being, but Cunk has had the kind of rise broadcast journalists dream about. After making her name in 2013 as an astonishingly dim yet opinionated commentator on Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker’s BBC Two comedy news show Weekly Wipe, she leveled up to hosting mockumentaries like Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Britain, all helmed by Brooker. Like the other thought leaders we trust to guide us through complex topics on screen, in her solo efforts, Cunk combines her own explanations and analyses (“If the Tudors were the Kardashians of their time, this was their Kim: Henry of Eight”) with real expert interviews. “How important are the words in a Shakespeares [sic] play?” she once asked the venerable Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale. “Could you do it without the words?” In early 2023, she broke UK containment, arriving on Netflix with her own, let’s say, unique, series-length take on world history, Cunk on Earth. Two years later, her special Cunk on Life dared to ask big questions about nature and the universe—the implicit one being: What would Planet Earth be like if Sir David Attenborough had the intellect of a microorganism?

Diane Morgan in Cunk on Cinema —Netflix

Philomena Cunk is a very British creation, in the tradition of Steve Coogan’s boorish TV-presenter character Alan Partridge and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show alter egos. From SNL’s “Weekend Update” to The Daily Show, America’s news-satire tradition favors comedians telling dark jokes about current events in their own voices. But by the time she crossed the Atlantic, three years ago, U.S. audiences were primed to make Cunk a cult-comedy hero stateside, circulating her quotes and searching YouTube for morsels of her earlier work. Cunk on Life even scored a pair of Emmy nominations. 

It’s true that Baron Cohen broke out bigger in the U.S., during the 2000s, especially with his ingenuously inappropriate Kazakh reporter character, Borat. But his heyday coincided with a golden age of confrontational political satire, when Michael Moore broke box office records with documentaries built around interviews that embarrassed conservative icons like Charlton Heston and culture jammers like the Yes Men captured their elaborate anti-corporate hoaxes in feature films. Baron Cohen did something similar. As Baron Cohen wrote in an essay for TIME that coincided with the October release of his feature Ali G: Who Iz I?: “Each of my characters has a specific mechanism to encourage people to drop their guards and show what they really believe, prejudices and all.” In one notorious Ali G Show stunt, Borat got the patrons of an Arizona honky-tonk singing and clapping along to a song about throwing Jews down a well (though some later said they were behaving as directed or always knew it was all a bit). 

Morgan has a different agenda. She rarely humiliates the experts she interviews, who are generally in on the joke but, as in real news programs, aren’t given the questions in advance. Sure, she does occasionally mystify someone. In Cunk on Cinema, that person is Michael Bay, who at one point exclaims: “These are odd questions!” Most of the time, Cunk only embarrasses herself, though she’s too dim to realize it. The cringe comedy comes from the way the character makes the leading minds in every field behave as though the idiotic non sequiturs she imposes on them are worth engaging with. They’re too polite (or leery of coming off as elitists) not to. And when they do ever-so-gently push back, she tends to perform offendedness. “What was the Soviet Onion?” she asks a history professor in Cunk on Earth. She must mean the Soviet Union, he replies. “I don’t wanna be rude,” Cunk counters, despite much evidence to the contrary, “but I think you’re mansplaining a bit.” As Brooker has said: “The strange thing about Cunk is she’s sort of weirdly in charge of things, even if she’s speaking to a professor or whatever.”

Diane Morgan in Cunk on Cinema —Netflix

Between interviews, she pontificates in the tones of a veteran newsreader, albeit one who has no understanding of the subject on which she’s been asked to extemporize. Cunk on Cinema will be extra entertaining to anyone who’s ever read a book or taken a survey course on the history of film, because of how deftly it plays on the field’s tropes and touchstones. Stanley Kubrick ca. 2001: A Space Odyssey is described offhandedly as a “groovy young director.” She refers to Soviet montage master Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark silent film Battleship Potemkin as Batsh-t Pumpkin, “one of cinema’s unwatchable masterpieces.” You needn’t have a Ph.D in Cinema Studies to appreciate the humor Brooker and Morgan wring out of Cunk’s hopelessness with names and titles. Wayne John, Marlo Brandon, E Dot T Dot (a.k.a. E.T.). Quentin Tarantino, she informs us, “is Italian for five spiders.” 

If you’ve ever listened to a TikToker with no medical training evangelize unregulated peptide injections, you’ll see mirrored in Cunk the blithe confidence of a person who’s getting rich repackaging their ignorance as subversive truth-telling. When she wonders, “Was James Dean born a teenager?,” it’s a benign version of the level of question we typically get from podcast hosts who spend three-hour episodes credulously “hearing out” conspiracy theorists. Now, as you might expect from a writing team led by the Black Mirror guy, she’s got artificial intelligence to hallucinate along with her. In Cunk on Cinema, she insists to Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. de Souza that the all-American genius of silent comedy Buster Keaton spoke in a Cornish accent, then plays him the AI audio to “prove” it. 

I don’t want to minimize the brilliance of Morgan’s deadpan performance or Brooker’s jokes, which approach the linguistic density of poetry and tend to contain sneaky insights that would be lost on the character giving voice to them. (Marilyn Monroe, says Cunk, “effortlessly blended sex appeal, vulnerability, comic timing, and innocence into one irresistible package for men to destroy.”) Yet I suspect so many of us love to laugh at Cunk because, for once in this choose-your-own-facts decade, the joke is on the fool or cynic with outsize influence instead of on anyone fed up with the latter contingent’s misinformation and glibness and idiocy and self-promotion at any cost. There’s a difference between thoughtful questions and thoughtless ones, informed opinions and hysterical polemic, challenging authority on principle and mindless contrarianism for personal gain. And it’s a relief to be reminded that someone still knows it.