History of the World, Part II: Historical, If Not Hysterical
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Mel Brooks’ 1981 parody of Hollywood costume movies, History of the World, Part 1, concluded with a trailer for a promised History of the World, Part II which, audiences were told was “coming soon.”
Brooks lied, or at least, he joked. In the 42 years since, empires have fallen, the Kardashians have risen, babies grown middle-age and former movie audiences now often prefer to sit at home and stream and binge.
Now, finally, the 96-year-old Brooks has honoured his mock promise. History of the World Part II, an eight-part sketch comedy series on Disney+ (or Hulu in the United States) is available today (March 6) with two new episodes dropping nightly until March 9. Hilarious? Not exactly — but the series is engaging as a creative exercise, with an occasional guffaw attached.
Brooks opens the series in a computer de-aged, muscular version of himself, with this modest intro: “Hello! I’m American treasure Mel Brooks. To some of you, I’m a hero; to others, merely a legend.”
The hero-legend is credited here as a writer and executive producer, and he’s also the narrator, a role held by Orson Welles in the original film. He also has a lot of help. There are four directors, nine other writers and dozens of guest stars in the series.
Most of the heavy-lifting goes to the trio of Nick Kroll (also a director), Wanda Sykes, and Ike Barinholtz, each of whom play multiple roles. The many famous guests, often not immediately recognizable in their period costumes and prosthetics, include Jack Black, Kumail Nanjiani, Jason Alexander, Jay Ellis, Seth Rogen, Taika Waititi and Danny DeVito. It seems as though almost anyone in contemporary comedy who was asked agreed to participate in a scene or two.
The series is designed as an anthology of short bits, weaving in and out of several ongoing story lines, with stand-alone sketches in between. It mostly moves quickly, with a firehouse of puns, body-humour jokes, and pop culture references. It’s a decidedly mixed bag, often juvenile and sometimes as flat as a weak Saturday Night Live sketch.
The rewards here are often more peripheral than head-on, in playing spot-the-star, in the clever concepts for some of the stories, and considering some sneaky political commentary. The narrative thread about the life of Jesus starts strongly from Judas’s perspective entitled Curb Your Judaism (with Kroll as the Larry David character and J.B. Smoove reprising his role as Larry’s acerbic houseguest), and the African American actor Jay Ellis (Isa Rae’s sad, handsome boyfriend in Insecure) as Jesus. The series, which toys with the history of antisemitism, riffs on the way Larry David’s character is always on the verge of being exposed and attacked for his misdeeds.
The Jesus episode grows weaker as it spins out. In a later episode, it turns into a parody of The Notebook with Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s romantic interest. A related sketch takes place at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, treated it as a marketing pitch meeting where the European bishops decide to rebrand Jesus as white and celibate and Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. That’s the highlight of the re-imagined Jesus story, which ends in a vacuous parody of Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, entitled The Last Supper Sessions.
The Russian revolution episode, in the style of The Fiddler on the Roof, comes through the perspective of a Jewish caterer, Schmuck Mudman (Kroll), bringing lunch to the post-revolutionary government (“a bagel and smear for Vladimir!”), with Jack Black as the bullied Joseph Stalin, an understudy waiting for his chance to step into the spotlight.
The crude low point is the Jackass crew acting out the assassination of the “Mad Monk” Rasputin (Johnny Knoxville), complete with a severed penis. The Civil War episode, which follows Ulysses S. Grant (Barinholtz) in his desperation to end the war so he can get a drink, has several call-backs to Brooks’ 1974 Western spoof, Blazing Saddles.
One storyline that’s most intriguing as an off-beat concept, if not a comedy, is the story of the first African American woman congresswoman and presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm (Sykes) which is performed as a 1970s Norman Lear sitcom, Good Times or The Jeffersons, complete with an artificial laugh track, as she juggles her feminist and Black allies.
In between are stand-alone bits: Real Housewives with concubines from Kublai Khan’s court; Kumail Nanjiani as an author in ancient India, pitching his idea for a book called Kama Souptra, a combination of sex and soup-making book. There’s Galileo posting on TicciTocci, Seth Rogen as Noah, wanting only lapdogs on the ark, and Josh Gadd’s Shakespeare as a belligerent show-runner in an Elizabethan-era writer’s room.
Brooks has always been self-referential or “meta” in his comedy, breaking the fourth wall and riffing on entertainment conventions. It’s consistent that History of the World, Part II feels like a exercise in historical enactment, an exercise in irreverent, relatively innocent, spoof humour from another era, reimagined by a generation of comic writers and performers who loved this stuff growing up, and can now pay tribute to the treasure and legend.
History of the World: Part II. Directed by Alice Mathias, David Stassen, Nick Kroll, Lance Bangs. Written by Ike Barinholtz, Emmy Blotnick, Guy Branum, Owen Burke, Adam Countee, Lance Crouther, Ana Fabrega, Fran Gillespie, and Janelle James. Starring Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes, Seth Rogen, Jason Alexander, Jack Black, Kumail Nanjiani, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Corddry, Sarah Silverman, Marla Gibbs. Available on Disney+ March 6, with two new episodes each night until March 9.