This whole clip is spoilerific of course. It does answer some questions in this thread.
I agree. We just discovered Cunk on Earth a few days ago and are loving it and her previous work. I looked her up here, and found that several people compared her early work to Ali G, which I think is off the mark. The common element is that both interviewed real experts or public figures in the persona of a stupid person.
But 1) it’s pretty clear that Cohen’s victims subjects weren’t in on the gag and Morgan’s are, and b) pwning them in the most cringey manner seems to be the main thrust of Cohen’s “humor,” along with his deep commitment to the performance art that was the Ali G character. (To be fair, many of his targets were eminently deserving of public ridicule.)
But as you said, that wears very thin, very fast. I watched a fair bit of Ali G when it first came out, amazed at the novelty, and I saw one of the Borat films. But I don’t think I’d watch either today with any real enjoyment.
Cunk, however, is not punking the experts she “interviews,” and that is not the main point of the shows. And as LHOD points out, she usually doesn’t take it too far into cringe territory.
She’s satirizing the whole documentary genre, a field in which I’ve been peripherally involved for most of my life. She’s mocking the style and tone of television docus very perceptively, with, as @Icarus points out, a budget to rival those serious targets. Which is pretty remarkable.
And she even mocks that fact at the end of one of the series, where she’s in a green screen studio and asks a crew member if people will believe she really was in all those locations.
It’s beautifully written, produced, and performed.
Really excellent show - I only have one episode left.
It seems like every time I’m getting tired of the humor, they throw in a brilliant joke and I’m invested all over again.
One thing I love about the treatment of the guests is that they all get a chance to show their expertise and to speak genuinely about their fields of interest. Even knowing they’re going to be participating in a jokey interview with a character actor, their nonplussed reactions seemed genuine and it would be easy to make them look foolish.
I particularly liked the guy who took the “clogged brain pipes” rambling question and said something like, “you’ve actually raised one of the classic philosophical problems in a really interesting way.”
I’m a couple of episodes in and I think the philosopher guy is hilarious. He is trying so hard to take deliberately ridiculous questions and turn them into a legitimate discussion of philosophy.
The expert who had to talk about American gun law and whether bears had arms was one of my favorites. Do Bears Have Arms?
Did the minute of silence for Laika last a whole minute? I’ve never laughed that hard at a simple pause (or tragedy) before.
The only bit of humor I didn’t really get were the frequent interruptions by Technotronic.
There’s nothing to get.
They did the same in her last series “Cunk on Britain” where every episode had a shoehorned reference to an obscure 80’s comedy series “Brush Strokes” The humour comes from you starting to wonder how they will shoehorn it into whichever episode you are watching.
I never saw the humor in Rickrolling, either.
I just saw the first episode and was reminded of Carl Pilkington from the Ricky Gervais show An Idiot Abroad. I didn’t realize that there was an actual connection to Gervais by way Afterlife until I heard it on a review today… I didn’t remember her from that show. (Which I liked a lot, BTW)
I am now remembering an Infinite Monkey Cage podcast from a few years ago. There was a female guest who was positive that aliens had landed in a small town in England in the 40s or 50s and she had all these “evidence”. Could that have been Dianne Morgan?
No I think that was Lucy Beaumont (wife of fellow comedian John Richardson and mad as a box of frogs).
Lucy is more like Philomena in real life than Diane is. Both have northern accents but Lucy’s accent is Yorkshire and Diane’s is Lancashire.
I quite enjoyed her series Mandy, which has had two series and a christmas special. It’s a not dissimilar character getting into trouble in real life.
I would love to see a really well-done wildlife mockumentory narrated by Sir David Attenborough. The production values would need to be as high as other great nature documentaries that Attenborough has been involved in, with actual nature photographers and a big enough budget to travel the world. And of course, it would need to employ top comedy writers for the script.
Attenborough’s narration would be completely deadpan, with his normal gravitas. He’d discuss absurd, fabricated behaviors and motivations of the animals on screen. In addition to real animals, there would be completely fabricated, absurd-looking animals doing ridiculous things made with high-end CGI.
Sure, this would need to be a high-budget production, but I believe it would be a smash blockbuster that would recoup the investment and make a hefty profit. How could it not?
But, Attenborough is 96 years old, so they better start soon.
I’ve watched the first two episodes of Cunk on Earth and Cunk on Britain and so far I think the latter is ten times funnier (better jokes and a better satire of documentaries).
The only problem about Cunk on Britain (which we finished watching last night) is that a lot of the cultural references go over the heads of us non-Brits.
We got this one, though.
That’s why God invented Google.
Yeah, nothing makes humor funnier than engaging in research! 
After, “We shall fight them bitches,” I don’t think I can work any more today.
I can’t think of many jokes where the punchline relied on knowing a specific British reference. I mean, I don’t know who Matt Baker from The One Show is, but clearly he’s a dark horse candidate for Pope.
It’s not quite Attenborough, but you might enjoy Ze Frank on YouTube. His True Facts series is a parody on Morgan Freeman, but they are also legitimately informative.