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Cunk On Earth: a mockumentary about normalized stupidity

Tickle the Funny Bone

By Arlo HenningsPublished about a year ago 3 min read
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Cunk On Earth: a mockumentary about normalized stupidity
Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Cunk On Earth arrived on Netflix in January 2023 to thaw me.

The premise

Do facts and history matter?

In a dry deadpan British sense of humor like Monty Python and Spinal Tap Cunk On Earth takes the viewer on a spin of wacky, reconstructed moments in history.

Cunk makes fun of a lot of things.

Historical documentaries, pop culture, and how a person who grew up on social media understands the world.

Did the Romans invent bleach arsing? Were the pyramids built top down to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them? Cavemen were boring. Who cares about ancient Greece and what's the relevancy of inserting a video of the mindless dance hit "Pump it Up."

Cunk on Earth is a British mockumentary television series produced by Charlie Brooker. The series stars Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk, an ill-informed investigative reporter, a character who previously starred on Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe and Cunk on Britain.

Writers Charlie Brooker , Michael Odewale, and Eli Goldstone bring it all home with their endless punch lines.

Cunk On Earth is a hard-hitting tongue-in-cheek screen bleed of how far humanity has sunk into the Cunk.

Cunk On Earth received a rare 100% Tomatometer rating. Critics love it. The audience isn't far behind giving it 85% like.

"It's such a fine line, This Is Spinal Tap once taught us, between stupidity and cleverness. And it's one that Cunk On Earth, a new mockumentary series… treads masterfully." –Dan Einav (Top Critic)

The show's guide, Philomena Cunk is the voice of the semi-fact internet generation.

So were the characters of Bill and Ted's Bogus journeys who needed to complete their history assignment.

They didn't research history because, with a time machine, they could collect historical figures like the Beethoven dude.

Cunk is a history lesson through the lens of a generation that grew up on Social Media.

Somewhere in this wildly absurd but illuminating romp is a larger message of who we are.

Watching Cunk as simply comedy is missing the point.

Welcome those who slept through history class and follow Taylor Swift instead.

*I read it on Twitter therefore it must be true.

*Wikipedia is the new go-to online Encyclopedia (not).

*If it's not viral who cares.

*In an age of half-truths, conspiracy, celebrity, and views-obsessed culture the empire was Star Wars, not Rome.

*School exams are a test for AI, not your IQ.

*I can't remember further than yesterday's trending Spotify hit.

*We know how old the Kardashians are but don't know how old America is.

*We know how much Elon Musk makes but don't know how to change a flat tire.

*More people care about the Super Bowl and who won a Grammy than the war in Ukraine.

We have lost our past and replaced it with an Instagram post.

No greater example of the dumber trend is reading Medium's success suggestion - write for a 9th-grade intelligence level.

If there was a history test on what Cunk covers most couldn't pass it and humor aside agree with her.

According to the author of "Bad or, the Dumbing of America."

Paul Fussell writes that we are living in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash. BAD is devoted to identifying examples of the phony or witless that public relations attempts to persuade us are genuine or grand.

We are also living in a moment where the 7-second TikTok attention span is telling us what matters.

Cunk On Earth consists of (5) 1-hour episodes and is headed to be a cult classic.

It's funny but when you see the pie stained your pants it's a cause for genuflection.

Sometimes to accept the truth we must dress it up with whipped cream.

Other writing by author

Pop Culture
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About the Creator

Arlo Hennings

Author 2 non-fiction books, music publisher, expat, father, cultural ambassador, PhD, MFA (Creative Writing), B.A.

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