Review: History of the World, Part II (dir. various, 2023)

Among other things, it features four different takes on the story of Jesus – a not-so-coincidental nod, I assume, to the four canonical gospels.

Jesus (Jay Ellis) and Judas (Nick Kroll) in History of the World, Part II.

It has been 42 years since Mel Brooks wrote, directed, and starred in History of the World, Part I, a loose collection of sketches spanning most of human history, from prehistoric cavemen to the French Revolution. When the film came out—only seven years after The Godfather Part II got Hollywood started down the path of sticking numbers on its sequels—the title itself was part of the joke. Mel Brooks’s film was a standalone effort, and he had no intention of making a follow-up.¹

Now, however, with the streaming wars ramping up and studios scraping the bottom of every barrel, looking for old properties to exploit, it was probably inevitable that someone, at some point, would make History of the World, Part II. And so it has come to pass—but instead of another 90-minute movie, we’re getting an eight-part miniseries totaling almost four hours (with two episodes per day coming March 6-9 on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in Canada and other countries).

The funny thing is, unlike a lot of recent content-library rip-offs—I’m looking at you, Star Wars and Star Trek franchises—the original History of the World wasn’t a particularly good movie, so it’s hard to say that its legacy is in danger of being ruined. If anything, there has always been room for improvement. And I’m happy to say that the new series is genuinely funny at least some of the time.

Mel Brooks, at 96, is still with us, and he serves as host and producer on this series. But the series is credited to no fewer than fifteen writers—including co-stars Ike Barinholtz, Nick Kroll, and Wanda Sykes—so it’s anyone’s guess which bits were written by Brooks himself. The humour is very Brooksian in places, though, especially when it comes to bad puns: Stalin offers to perform “CCCPR” on someone who has trouble breathing, Typhoid Mary hosts an “Itch livestream”, Galileo ends his TicciTocci videos by saying “Peace-uh, the Leaning Tower of”, the ancient Egyptians insist they aren’t trying to lure each other into “pyramid schemes”, and so on.

As you can probably guess from the livestreams and TicciTocci videos, this series is rather different from the movie in certain ways, starting with its frequent social-media gags. (Never mind the internet, Part I came out at a time when almost no one had computers at home.)² Princess Anastasia escapes being assassinated with the rest of the Romanovs because she happens to be in the middle of her own livestream at the time (rendered here like a grainy black-and-white movie of the period, before you needed filters for that). Sigmund Freud promotes a “master class” on psychiatry but keeps making, uh, Freudian slips, calling it a “mommy class” and a “masturbates”.

The series also has direct parodies of specific TV shows. One of the more amusing, indeed inspired, recurring bits is ‘JackRasp’, a riff on the masochistic Jackass series, in which Johnny Knoxville himself plays Rasputin, the so-called “mad monk” who, according to legend, survived multiple assassination attempts. Elsewhere, Shirley Chisholm’s bid to become the first black female major-party nominee for president is rendered as a 1970s sitcom. Another segment is devoted to “The Real Concubines of Kublai Khan”. And the story of Jesus… well, more on that in a minute.

Instead of the linear, chronological progression through time that the movie had, this series hops back and forth a lot. Even when it follows a major story arc, it chops the arc into short two- or three-minute bits, spreads them across the episodes, and mixes them in with some other sketches. This scrambled, non-linear approach may actually hold the viewer’s attention better than a more straightforward approach; if you were to watch all of the Civil War scenes, say, in one sitting, you might find that they begin to wear thin, but as it is, it all kind of plays like the English weather: if you don’t like what you’re seeing right now, just wait a few minutes and it will change.

The most significant difference between the movie and the miniseries, however, may be how the series reflects the change in comedic sensibility that has swept over the culture in the last generation or two. A lot of the humour in the original film was driven by lust, from the sexy dancer who gets Gregory Hines to reveal he isn’t really a eunuch, to the French monarch who grabs every woman he meets and then tells the camera, “It’s good to be king.” Compared to the film, the miniseries is almost sexless—even the segment on the Kama Sutra is basically a series of book illustrations—and instead it’s got politically conscious jokes about racism, sexism, and the like.

But of course, my primary interest in this series has to do with the biblical elements.