Mel Brooks’ 1981 film ‘History of the World, Part I’ gets a TV series sequel with assists from Nick Kroll, Ike Barinholtz, Wanda Sykes and a cast of dozens.
If you don’t count the years when he worked as a drummer, a “tummler” and a teenage comic in the Catskills, Mel Brooks began his show business career in television, writing for Sid Caesar at the dawn of the medium. He returned in the mid-1960s to co-create “Get Smart,” and now he is back again, with Hulu’s “History of the World, Part II,” a sequel to his 1981 film “History of the World, Part I.”
That film, a series of sketches set in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, the Spanish Inquisition and Revolutionary France, is not the one by which he will be best remembered, or would likely want to be, but it is the one Brooks movie that suggests a second edition, with the possibility built into the title. Given that it is among his lesser films, I was not at all sure what to expect from the series, and though it takes a moment to get up on its legs, once it established its rhythms and breadth, I was completely sold.
“The History of the World, Part II” is both a sequel and a redemption — vulgar, funny, fun and smart about history and the modern world. It has been made with (and one might guess primarily by) other, younger hands — well, they would have to be, given that Brooks is 96 — but it’s recognizably School of Mel, with an added air of tribute and celebration.
Most notable, and most visible, among his new collaborators are Ike Barinholtz, Wanda Sykes and Nick Kroll, who take a number of roles throughout the show’s eight episodes. All are credited as executive producers and writers (as is Brooks, or “American treasure Mel Brooks,” as he introduces himself), and with its mix of short pieces and longer, intercut continuing stories, its media and social media parodies, it formally resembles Kroll’s great “Kroll Show.” (Kroll himself is the series’ most Brooksian presence, especially in his role as a shtetl purveyor of mud pies, though he also pays homage to Gene Wilder’s “I’m hysterical” scene from “The Producers.
