I suspect many Americans met Philomena Cunk on Instagram or TikTok first, then saw her on the telly. For months before Netflix dropped the mockumentary Cunk on Earth stateside, the BBC's verified accounts cleverly paved the way with clips of lead comedian Diane Morgan as her alter-ego, Philomena, somberly confronting professional scholars with wildly stupid questions.

In one clip, a well-meaning expert has to face Cunk's probing interrogation about Elvis Presley's hip gyrations. "Why was it so dangerous to show Elvis from the waist down? Was he naked, like a pervert on a Zoom call?" Having watched Cunk's earlier series, Cunk on Britain, as a grad student in the U.K., I was thrilled she had followed me across the pond. Like the best of Monty Python, the show's absurdist exterior belies a quiet sort of profundity. Cunk is one of the most loving yet piercing sendups of academic self-seriousness I have ever seen.

No written quotation can do justice to the deadpan intonation of Morgan's Bolton accent, which drops every boneheaded non sequitur into the middle of the room with a resounding thud. It's hard to imagine believing her for very long, and some of her interviewees seem to catch on that they're being had. But Morgan always proceeds as if in deadly earnest.

On the surface, this is a familiar satire format in the mold of Ali G or This is Spinal Tap. Cunk on Earth takes off certain educational programs familiar to British viewers. The narrator — usually David Attenborough or someone like him — glides soothingly over some subject or other of general interest, like the migration patterns of Atlantic salmon or the history of the Thirty Years' War. Green-screened to the gills, her mouth slathered with ineptly chosen lipstick, Cunk indulges in the sort of preposterous reenactments and historical summaries that are just ridiculous enough to feel almost real. Her subject is the history of everything — all of which, as she frequently notes with amusing gravitas, "happened right here: on Earth."

But the highlight of the whole thing is the interviews, in which Cunk unabashedly presents the world's best and brightest with the banal concerns of a somewhat self-absorbed everywoman. Sometimes this brings out the best in her subjects, as when Cambridge philosophy professor Douglas Hedley walks patiently with her through a meandering story about "my mate Paul," using her pedestrian concerns as an invitation to theological speculation. "You've raised a very significant question about the nature of providence," says Hedley. "Have I?" asks Cunk. "You have indeed," replies Hedley — and if it's not strictly true, it's a generously Socratic way of making something meaningful out of a rambling anecdote. One imagines that Hedley is great with his students.

In other cases, though, Cunk's questions are so mind-numbingly basic that they deflate the pretensions of abstruse academic theory. In the series's crowning moment, Philomena quizzes theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili, CBE, about the idea that life is just a computer simulation. "If this is a simulation, why is the computer making me ask you this?" demands Cunk. "Why do I actually have to come and film this? Couldn't a computer just show it on the telly in the simulation? ... Why isn't it just me eating a chocolate eclair in a loop?"

Faced with these simple questions, simulation theory dissolves into meaningless incoherence. Al-Khalili isn't trying to defend the theory, just to explain it — but he seems genuinely flummoxed by the fundamental issues Cunk raises. When a Commander of the Order of the British Empire can't answer first-order questions in plain terms about a theory that concerns every living human, people are entitled to question the use — or indeed the sanity — of such obscure speculations.

Academics, that much-maligned class of seekers after hidden knowledge, have come under considerable fire of late. Much of it has hit the mark. But nothing is more disarming or more devastating than to ask a learned philosopher how his grand ideas might sound to a small child or a slightly dimwitted member of the general public. For all the jeremiads that may deservedly be written about the decline of the academy, I wonder if any will be quite so illuminating, or so amusing, as Cunk on Earth.

Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the Young Heretics podcast. His book, How to Save the West , is available now.