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.
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.
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 —NetflixIf 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.
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