Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I (Brooksfilms, 20th Century-Fix, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. on February 17 my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie from 1981 called Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I. This was made when Brooks was coming off a run of brilliantly funny, anarchic movies like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and High Anxiety, all of them successful both artistically (if one can use that word in connection with Mel Brooks!) and commercially. History of the World was a box-office disappointment and it’s easy to see why, even though much of it is as funny as its predecessors in the Brooks canon. It was narrated by Orson Welles (of all people) and dealt with four eras in human history: the caveman era, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. The prehistoric segment is an obvious parody of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, even though at least Brooks avoided showing a monolith. All the other elements are there, though, including the opening of Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” booming out on the soundtrack as we get picturesque long-shots of ape-men silhouetted against a blood-red sky. We also get some of the predictable gags, including BRooks indulging his obsession with scatology; when one of his caveman charaqcters paints a picture of a buffalo on a cave wall and Welles tells us he is the first artist, he then says that almost as soon as the first artist emerged there came the first critic – a full-bearded man in a black fur coat who pees on the painting.

Brooks used most of his “regulars” in the cast, including Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero, Madeline Kahn as Empress Nympho (and her role is a rehash of her famous Dietrich parody “Lily von Shtupp” in Blazing Saddles), Harvey Korman as “Count de Monay” in the French revolution sequence (and he too repeats a Blazing Saddles schtick when he constantly has to correct people who mispronounce his name as “Count de Money”), Cloris Leachman (screamingly funny as Madame Defarge), and Ron Carey (as “Swiftus Lazarus,” agent of Brooks’s “stand-up philosopher” in the Roman Empire sequence – the name is a pun on real-life super-agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar,so named because he was famous for grabbing deals for clients or properties before anyone else knew they were even available), as well as an uncredited by readily recognizable Bea Arthur as an unemployment insurance clerk in ancient Rome. (Of course Brooks can’t resist making fun of the Roman alphabet’s use of “V” to represent “U”: the window from which Arthur works is labeled, “VNEMPLOYMENT INSVRANCE.”) There's also an “Introducing” credit for Mary-Margaret Hughes as Miriam, a Vestal Virgin in ancient Rome, and guest appearances by Sid Caesar (as a caveman – in the 1950’s Sid Caesar starred in one of the funniest TV shows ever made and Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen and Neil Simon were in his writers’ room!), Shecky Greene (as a Roman general) and Gregory Hines (as Black tap-dancer Josephus).

The film is typical Brooks looniness, alternating scenes of almost savage brilliance with other scenes that make you (made me, anyway) groan in their tastelessness. One sequence that works brilliantly is the Spanish Inquisition, with Brooks as Torquemada and a group of nuns who doff their habits to reveal silver bathing suits underneath. The nuns do a synchronized dive into a swimming pool in obvious imitation of Busby Berkeley’s great water ballets, set to a song about the immortality of the Inquisition written by Brooks and Ronny Graham n a sequence choreographed by Alan Johnson. Johnson would take over as director on Brooks’ next production, a 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 anti-Nazi masterpiece To Be or Not to Be, and Graham played a key supporting role in that film. (I remember showing Charles a tape of the original To Be or Not to Be early in our relationship and he was astonished, coming to it from the Brooks remake, that the two were so close. The only significant difference was the addition of Tim Matheson’s Gay character, put in to dramatize the Nazis’ persecution of Queer people.)

The French Revolution sequence seems quite likely to have been a deliberate knock-off of Monsieur Beaucaire – the 1946 spoof version with Bob Hope in the lead. In both films a nobleman (in History of the World it’s the King himself) fearing for his life finds a milquetoast nobody who looks like him to impersonate him so he doesn’t get killed. Brooks cast himself as both Louis XVI (whom he made considerably sexually randier than the real one; unlike his father and grandfather, Louis XVI was neither particularly interested in sex nor good at it) and the court’s so-called “piss boy,” whose job it is to carry around the royal chamberpot and make it available to anyone who might need it. I give Brooks credit for at least resisting the obvious temptation to have the pot break and spill its noxious contents all over everyone, but even so the gag isn’t that funny and it’s nowhere near the laff-riot the famous bean-eating scene (which launched a thousand fart jokes in later and much less funny movies) in Blazing Saddles. There’s also a deus ex machina in the form of a white horse named Miracle, whose super-powers apparently include the ability to travel through time, since it somehow leaps through the centuries from its initial appearance in the Roman empire sequence to spirit Louis XVI (or his “piss boy,” since by this time even I was pretty unsure as to who was who) and his three friends away from the guillotine and out of France.

I could think of at least one way History of the World could have been even funnier than it was: if Mel Brooks had turned it into a parody of Irwon Allen’s bizarre 1957 filmization of Henric Willem van Loon’s 1922 pop history The Story of Mankind. In that film Allen set up a heavenly “trial” between the “Spirit of Man” (Ronald Colman in his last film role before his death) and the Devil (Vincent Price – who else?). The gimmick is that God is getting so annoyed at the sinfulness of the human species he’s considering sending another flood or a similar apocalypse to destroy the human race, and Colman’s and Price’s characters go back and forth, citing incidents of either good or bad in human history to convince God either to destroy humanity or to spare it. One could readily imagine what Mel Brooks could have done with that premise instead of just doing what amounts to a film of sketches about various epochs! He might even have cast himself as both the “Spirit of Mankind” and the Devil, with Orson Welles as God. In actual fact, History of the World, Part 1 was a financial flop, as was To Be or Not to Be, and 20th Century-Fox let Brooks go and he didn’t direct another movie until his screamingly funny Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs, for MGM in 1987. (That film was helped by the fact that the Star Wars mythos was already so silly Brooks didn’t need to do much to it to make it hilarious.)

Today Mel Brooks is considered an elder statesman of comedy and he’s redeemed himself commercially with his reworking of his first film, The Producers, into a Broadway musical. And in case you were wondering whether there ever was a History of the World, Part II, the closing credits for Part ! include mock clips from it – “Hitler on Ice,””Viking Funeral” and “Jews in Space” (the last being a science-fiction romp in which Jewish astronauts fly spaceships that look like Stars of David; one wonders whether these craft are armed with the Jewish space lasers on which loony-tunes Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene said in all seriousness caused the big California wildfires of a couple of years ago),and a Brooks Wikipedia page lists History of the World, Part II as in production as an animated TV series in 2023 – though I’ll believe that when I see it!