‘History of the World, Part II’ Is the Weird Love Child of Mel Brooks and ‘Kroll Show’
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History of the World, Part I is far from the most beloved Mel Brooks movie, even if “It’s good to be the king” is one of the more enduring lines he ever wrote. It is, however, by far the most in need of a sequel. After all, it’s been 42 years since Brooks concluded the film with teasers for History of the World, Part II, which was to include the sketches “Hitler on Ice,” “A Viking Funeral,” and, most memorably, “Jews in Space.” Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are stone-cold classics, but they didn’t promise sequels that they never delivered.
Well, we’re now in the era where no title is too old or obscure to demand a reboot or revival. So even though Brooks is now 96 years old, and has largely confined his output to voice-acting roles for nearly two decades, History of the World, Part II is finally here, in the form of an eight-episode Hulu series.
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I am embargoed from revealing whether the new version finally gives us full-length versions of “Hitler on Ice” or “Jews in Space.” What I can say is that the Hulu show feels largely faithful to the spirit of the movie, for good and for ill.
Where most Brooks films attempted to create something resembling a plot on which to hang the various jokes about farts, erections, and Frankenstein’s monster singing “Putting on the Ritz,” History of the World, Part I was simply a collection of sketches set during famous moments throughout human history. And, like most sketch comedy movies and shows, it was wildly uneven. The musical number about the Spanish Inquisition is one of the most inspired things in any filmed comedy, let alone in the Brooks catalog. But other than “It’s good to be the king,” the sequence set during the French Revolution feels like it drags on forever and a day.
The streaming version similarly yo-yos in quality from bit to bit. Some are wildly funny, while others will leave you wondering how they got approved at all, let alone why they keep coming back from one episode to the next. And even within those, there can be unexpected bursts of hilarity. One of the more prominent ongoing bits features Ike Barinholtz as Ulysses S. Grant, who is desperate to end the Civil War so he will finally be allowed to have another drink. Almost none of it works, with one exception. Timothy Simons cameos in the part he was put on this earth to play: Abraham Lincoln, whose abnormal height turns everyday living into a painful chore.
Brooks is no longer the chief creative force here, though he’s a credited writer, does some voiceover narration, and kind of appears on camera in the opening episode. Instead, the lead writers are Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes, Barinholtz, and The Mindy Project alum David Stassen. There are references to various Brooks films, including Kroll and Pamela Adlon doing their own version of the “I’m hysterical!” scene from The Producers, and some of the actors (Barinholtz in particular) are clearly inspired by Brooks’ rhythms as an actor.
But the series feels equal parts Mel Brooks and The Kroll Show. (Plus, a good chunk of the cast has done voice work on Big Mouth.) Nearly every sketch is in some ways filtering history through the lens of modern pop-culture parody. And because many of the sketches recur from episode to episode, some of them eventually spoof multiple things. The story of Jesus (played by Jay Ellis from Insecure) is at different points riffing on Curb Your Enthusiasm (complete with J.B. Smoove as one of the Apostles), The Notebook, and The Beatles: Get Back documentary. And the Russian Revolution manages to incorporate Fiddler on the Roof, hip-hop, reality television, social media influencers, and — in one of the more consistently funny gags in the entire thing — a take on Jackass where Johnny Knoxville himself plays the seemingly indestructible Rasputin. (“I am Rasputin, and this is ‘Getting Stabbed in the Back and Thrown in the River Neva!’” he announces at the beginning of one of these.)
Some of these recurring sketches land beautifully. I was never sorry, for instance, to see the return of Sykes as trailblazing presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, whose adventures are presented as if she’s the star of a Jeffersons-esque sitcom with a boisterous studio audience. But in many cases, the biggest laughs came from short one-shot bits, like Ana Fabrega from Los Espookys as a Mesoamerican woman trying to avoid being a human sacrifice by telling her captors that she’s not a virgin, or Sam Richardson as Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson, who perpetrates history’s first crank call.
History of the World, Part II is, in other words, more or less what you might have expected from a long, long, long-delayed sequel to the movie. I rolled my eyes when some sketches kept coming back again and again, but I also laughed more than enough to feel glad I watched it all. And if Hulu considers it a success, I doubt we’ll have to wait quite as many decades to get Part III.
The first two episodes of History of the World, Part II begin streaming March 6 on Hulu, with two additional episodes being released daily through March 9. I’ve seen the whole season.
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