History of the World: Part I

When I completed my Mel Brooks filmography, almost every movie of his fell into one of two buckets: recent first-time watches, or movies I'd seen so many times they were burned into memory. But there was one exception: History Of The World Part I. I'd seen it once, decades prior, and while I remembered little of it, I liked what I remembered ("these fifteen ... TEN! Ten Commandments!"). But after a recent re-watch of Blazing Saddles, I figured I should go back and watch the one movie Brooks movie that felt like a black hole to me, and see if it really deserved that 7/10 score I had assigned. No, it didn't. I think the greatest evidence for what I'm about to say against History is that the gap between History and Spaceballs was the largest gap in his filmography to that point. Watching History now, it plays like a creator running on autopilot because they have no real ideas on where to go other than repeating familiar, tired schtick, and it shows in multiple ways. You can feel the movie slam into a brick wall after the Roman sequence; the Spanish Inquisition is one long, tedious musical number, and the French Revolution is a five minute sketch stretched out into a half an hour. Even the Roman sequence loses steam by the end, but at least it has some energy. History is at its best in the first ten minutes, when the sequences are short, punchy, and get to the jokes as fast as possible. But that brings us to the problem of the jokes themselves. The humor is tired, dated, and worst of all unfocused. What made movies like Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, and Young Frankenstein work so well is that they have something on which to focus their humor. All the jokes run through, and are crafted to fit, the genre Brooks is spoofing. Even when the jokes off-color or risque, they still fit the moment and are done in a way that fits the movie. They don't just say "look at Inga's tits!" in Young Frankenstein; they make a joke about her being young and busty and attractive in a way that fits. History doesn't have a solid framework, being a series of vignettes, so it doesn't have anything around which the humor can coalesce, so the jokes just become tacky, hacky, or sometimes, offensive. The best example are the jokes about race. In Blazing Saddles, the use of the N-word and the jokes about race work for two reasons: one, the time the movie is set in gives the racism context, and two, the racists are always the butt of the joke. The movie never punches down at Bart or the rest of the black cast. History knows no such courtesy. I'm not saying Mel Brooks is racist, don't get me wrong, but the race-based jokes aren't clever or witty or insightful; they're lazy, low-hanging fruit. Then again, low-hanging fruit is as high as most of this movie's "humor" can reach. Most of the jokes are based on sex, bodily functions, or body parts. There is nothing even remotely as funny as "But I shoot with this hand". History feels like a comedian who doesn't know how to tie his routine together, and doesn't have a muse, so he's leaning on old, broken crutches. This brings us to the other anchor dragging down this movie, and that is Mel Brooks himself. I'm not trying to come with a HAWT TAEK here; Mel Brooks is almost always hilarious as a performer. History's problem is that is omnipresent. He may have been a central character in Silent Movie, but that was a trio of actors sharing the lead. Brooks is in almost every historical period, and he is hamming it up it an uncomfortably dumb degree. History has a lot of his usual cast -- Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Dom Deluise, and so on -- but they are bit players, relegated to one section. Had Brooks limited himself to one role, and allowed others to take point, History wouldn't feel so much like a vanity project. But when he's mugging through the Spanish Inquisition song, he wears out his welcome real quick ... and then he plays a DOUBLE role in the French Revolution section, and it's just too much. I've seen a lot of reviews that call this movie "scattered", and I don't think that's accurate. I think there's merit to the concept of a hilarious, satirical look at the history of the world as a series of sketches. Look no further than Monty Python, just a few years later, tackling the heady concept of the meaning of life in a sketch comedy movie. The difference was that made fun of its topics without needing to punch down, didn't shunt everybody to the side for the sake of one person, and kept each sketch short and to the point. Had History kept up the pace of the first ten minutes or so, thereby minimizing the damage and fatigue of the over-long three main sequences could do. But instead of getting in, landing some quick comedic punches, and getting out, the movie drags and stalls, becoming less than the sum of its parts.