Reacting to Philomena Cunk | BEST BITS
People had been suggesting Philomena Cunk to me for ages, so I finally sat down with some of her best bits. I’m a Canadian living in the UK, and British comedy is one of the things I love exploring here. I hadn’t seen these clips before and wasn’t sure what I was about to get.
What got me was the combination of completely absurd questions and people trying to answer them properly. From my understanding, these were real people with expertise in their subjects. Cunk would say something ridiculous with a straight face, and the look on the expert’s face was priceless.
Start with a building, end with a shoe
One of the first clips had Cunk asking a professor of architecture what a building was. He gave a broad answer about something someone had built, and she immediately applied it to her shoes. It’s such a silly turn for an interview to take, with the expert’s explanation becoming the opening for another absurd question.
The compilation moved quickly, which made me want to try longer interviews too. A few seconds gave me the joke, but I wanted more of the context and the conversation around it. There seemed to be so much here that one collection of moments was barely a starting point.
Another interview took a serious discussion of nuclear weapons and the threat of destruction, then abruptly moved on to whether the expert liked ABBA. In a different clip, Cunk went from a discussion involving a mirror to asking why a reflection isn’t upside down, before acknowledging that she wasn’t talking to a mirrors expert. These are her comic questions, rather than useful explanations of the subjects.
I had to stop and look up the woman playing her, Diane Morgan. I thought her commitment to the character was incredible. The questions were already ridiculous, but asking them with that much composure was a huge part of what I enjoyed. I absolutely love her.
Bread sauce was the one thing I could defend
The food clips gave me a familiar subject. When Cunk questioned the idea of bread sauce, I remembered making it for my own channel years earlier. It had actually been really nice. I could agree about its questionable appearance, though. Enjoying the taste doesn’t mean I can pretend it looks especially appealing.
In another food interview, Cunk asked Jay Rayner about Tudor Christmas meals and peacock, then steered the discussion towards what all that meat might do to people’s bowels. He tried to answer, qualifying what he knew and what he was only guessing. I was watching him work so hard to stay with the questions.
That’s what I kept coming back to. I had no idea how the interviewees maintained their composure with seemingly ridiculous questions delivered so seriously. I also wondered whether anyone had ever been a bad sport about it. I would have thought someone agreeing to an interview with Cunk would know to expect absurd deadpan silliness, but that was my assumption, not something I’d established about every guest.
An onion the expert couldn’t correct
One longer exchange turned the Soviet Union into the Soviet onion. The expert tried to correct the name, but Cunk insisted she’d seen it written down and wanted to stick to her version. Eventually the conversation reached actual vegetables and what he knew about them, followed by her asking whether he had an allotment.
That gives you the sort of conversation I mean. The expert can recognise the error and offer an answer, yet the character keeps pushing the interview somewhere else. I thought this very deadpan, satirical humour worked brilliantly, and I felt I could have watched far more than I did.
I hadn’t encountered Diane Morgan back in Canada. At the time, I wondered whether she was less well known outside Britain, though I could easily have been wrong and couldn’t speak for everyone elsewhere. What I could say was that I found her absolutely hilarious. By the end I was looking for suggestions of interviews, episodes and specials, because I still didn’t really know where to begin with everything she’d done.
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