Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk returns in “Cunk on Life”

Is life’s meaning a riddle that can be answered, and if so, should we listen, or cover our ears to avoid spoilers? These questions, and many more equally idiotic ones, are the focus of the new single-episode special, “Cunk on Life,” streaming on Netflix. Host Philomena Cunk wants answers to the big picture mysteries of what it means to be human, and she’s going to ask every academic in England until she gets them.

The premise of any Cunk special is to spoof talking head documentaries by replacing a sage, urbane host with, well, Philomena Cunk, a misinformed host who asks actual distinguished academics the silliest questions they’ve ever been asked. As played by actress Diane Morgan, Cunk is voraciously curious but lacks any grasp on the areas that she’s ostensibly researching, whether human anatomy or art history. She’s prone to working in bewildering anecdotes about her friend Paul or her ex Sean, both of whom are similarly perplexed about science and the human body.

The wonder and the weakness of Cunk as a character is that the jokes are all variations on the same concept. What if the least suitable person imaginable hosted a documentary? Cunk refers to Moses as “the Mr. Beast of his day,” calls Adam and Eve “the first humans to disappoint their dad,” and explains their exile from Eden with “God had hidden the secret of knowledge within a delicious fruit, but then he’d forbidden them to eat it for some [expletive] reason.”

Creator Charlie Brooker, also known for making “Black Mirror,” had planned for Cunk to be more of a clueless posh host, but Morgan thought her natural Northern English accent would sound funnier, telling British publication The iPaper in 2016, ” It just does, I don’t know why. It flattens the words out.” She does not ever break, not even when she asks an academic, “When a person dies, which hole does the ghost come out of, north or south?”

This is one of the more printable jokes in a special filled with ones far too profane or risque for this newspaper’s standards. Sometimes I had to pause and rewind because I was laughing so hard I missed a follow-up joke. Morgan’s character has a real way with words, and the curious poetry of her utterances is what elevates her from simply being foolish to being compulsively watchable, as when she refers to the human brain as “a sort of smart cauliflower.” At one point in “Cunk on Life,” she asks a professor of physics if he’s “heard of DNA.” “Yes,” he replies.

The special is divided into sections, such as “Innards and Outards” and “Morality and Stuff.” It feels ironic to complain that this nonsense mockumentary doesn’t hold together as well as the prior one, but the progress of human history in her earlier special, “Cunk on Earth,” provided an arc that the more vague concept of life doesn’t. “Cunk on Life” wanders, and often her narration is funnier than the interviews. Late in the show, she asks Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics and prominent UK scientist, if she’s wasting his time, and he bluntly replies, “Yeah.”

Cox is a big deal, and she is absolutely wasting his time. But it’s not quite funny. Part of the charm of earlier segments is how hard her experts strive to explain the world to her. They’re quite nice to her. Cunk may be misguided, but there’s something sad about one of these geniuses being cruel to her. The whole point here is that we know she’s wasting everyone’s time. That’s why it’s so funny. With the Cox interview, the subtext becomes the text.

“Cunk on Earth” was riotously funny throughout; “Cunk on Life” is very funny until about the mid-point, when it hits a screeching halt with a cringey segment on the death penalty from which it struggles to recover. And that segment. Woof. Cunk “interviews” a death row inmate who has murdered multiple people to ask him about death; the conversation fails as comedy. It’s the only fake interview in the show — an actor plays the inmate — and it jars here. The character has ventured into dark topics before, but the bit punctures the world of the show in a way that derails the flow. It’s a creative risk with no payoff.

Despite that low point, the show is worth a watch for the very amusing stuff that surrounds it. Frankly, a lot of TV is pretty uneven these days. In “Cunk on Life,” at least you know you’ll get some good laughs.

Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at lisa.weidenfeld@globe.com. Follow her on X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.