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History Of The World: Part I (1981)
Comedy Central, 9:00-11:00 a.m. EST Sunday (repeats 8:00-10:00 p.m.)
Full IMDb listing

Mel Brooks reigns supreme as the funniest of all living filmmakers. That's a certainty and if you tried to sell me on another filmmaker for that title, all you'd get in response would be a condescending smile and a series of nods as I stirred my drink and discreetly scanned the room for someone else to talk to, preferably somebody who isn't out on a 24-hour pass from some sort of facility.

There are plenty of people in the movie industry who make a career out of funny performances but seemingly only a few who want to make funny movies. In the Eighties we had the "Airplane!" team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, and today, the Farrelly brothers have a license to make as many "Dumb And Dumber" and "Something About Mary" films as they want. But though their movies are unquestionably funny and will always be staples of Blockbuster's 5-day-rental rack, it's hard to imagine them acquiring greater reputations as time goes by. We've also got Albert Brooks. He sure wants to make comedies that will endure, but as brilliant as he is, you just can't picture him putting in a scene where a guy slips on dog poop, gets his head caught in a USA Today vending machine, and has to beg passers-by for quarters so he can free himself. And that holds Albert Brooks back. I mean, it's sort of like putting your life in the hands of a surgeon who refuses to cut into any body parts he deems icky. Ya gotta be willing to do everything you can for your patients.

Mel Brooks is for the ages. "Blazing Saddles" is an hour and a half without a single misstep. "Young Frankenstein" transcends mere parody, using the imagery and conventions of classic horror films so ambitiously and shrewdly that they underscore and add resonance to the humor just as effectively as they originally did for terror. And "The Producers" is simply brilliant. Show me any one of those "100 Greatest Lists Of All Time" that have been popping up recently. I'll give you "Birth Of A Nation" and "Rashomon" but I bet I can find at least five flicks on the list that unquestionably aren't as good as "The Producers."

I say all of this because I need to ask, rhetorically, why all of Mel Brooks' films since "History Of The World: Part I" have been so reliably mediocre. Sometimes downright embarrassingly bad. I have taken an oath as a critic to be honest about my opinions no matter how fond I am of a filmmaker, but dammit, that doesn't mean I don't feel guilty about it sometimes.

"History Of The World" is such a colossal step backward from Brooks' previous films that it's hard to believe that it was made by the same man. One of Brooks' great strengths was the fact that he could confidently and effectively wield any weapon in the comedic arsenal. Gross-out, wordplay, sight-gag, bawdy, Make You Laugh Even As It Makes You Think...and I'm sure there are a dozen more types of humor but I'm not Mel so I wouldn't be able to make out a complete list off the top of my head. Anyway, in Mel's pre-History it's clear that he had mastered them all. He demonstrated in every film that he knew what made each kind of joke work and how it had to be presented.

But where is this in "History Of The World: Part I"? It's almost sad to see that his infallible ambition to try new things has been replaced by a brand of comedy which could best be called "1971 Cocktail Lounge Napkin humor." It's filled with tits and dicks, with "colored people" and "fags," with pissing and crapping and humping...and sure, those are all familiar Brooks themes but here they seem to be employed not with the precision and effortlessness of a Samurai master but with the uninformed lack of focus of the young apprentice who's just found out where the boss hides the key to the weapons locker. Almost nothing in this movie works, and its attempts to be funny are so cluelessly out of touch with what makes an audience laugh — even to audiences back in 1981 — that the whole thing's almost uncomfortable to watch.

The movie is also filled with far too many elderly comics who, your parents (no, your grandparents) will tell you, were funny 30 or 40 years ago, assuming they can remember who they are, like Jack Carter and Charlie Callas. Here as always they fail to make you wonder why they haven't had steady gigs since the days when smoking unfiltered Camels while drinking enormous tumblers of straight scotch was pursued as a nightly aerobic exercise.

"History Of The World: Part I" is an anthology of stories set in various historical periods, from Neanderthal Man to the French Revolution. The latter and a story about the Holy Roman Empire are the only ones which attempt to tell a long, full story and that's a dang shame because it's the half-dozen short "blackout"-type sketches which contain all of the movie's laughs. Mel makes one hell of a Moses (after so many years as "The 2000 Year-Old Man," how could he not?) and his decision to turn the Spanish Inquisition into a spectacular musical number that shows us the Mel we all love and trust in one of his best sequences ever.

Normally, when it's time to assign a rating to a movie, the rating is an obvious statement: anything in the one-star range means that it's an overall awful film. But I think the fact that "History Of The World: Part I" is an anthology means that I should make an exception. It gets one and a half stars [NOTE: The image file for which does not exist, hence the one-star graphic above — Ed.], but in this case it reflects my opinion that one third of it is a four-star movie and the remaining hour really ain't. It's a great movie if you change the channel or hit fast-forward every time you see a toga or a powdered wig.

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