Woke ‘History of the World Part II’ Trailer Confirms Our Fears
Laugh-free teaser adopts anachronistic race casting, groan-worthy gags
Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part I” features a killer joke in its title alone.
Hint: It’s the “Part 1” part.
For years movie fans either assumed a Part II existed or waited, and waited, for Brooks to uncork a sequel even though he has yet to shoot a sequel to any of his comedy classics.
Now, we’re getting a literal Part II to the 1981 comedy, courtesy of an 8-part Hulu series. Brooks is listed as a writer and executive producer of the mini-series, but our first glimpse has little of Brooks’ Borscht Belt snap or silliness.
Instead, it’s broad gags, aggressively diverse casting and a flash of woke.
We feared the latter given the names attached to the project.
Wanda Sykes is one of comedy’s most progressive voices, and Ike Barinholtz flashed his woke bona fides with the 2018 flop “The Oath.”
The original film featured a murderer’s row of funny folk, from Brooks and Madeline Kahn to Dom DeLuise, Harvey Norman and Cloris Leachman. The Hulu series features Skyes, Barinholtz, Nick Kroll, Sarah Silverman, J.B. Smoove and Johnny Knoxville, among others.
RELATED: SHOCK: ‘THE VIEW’ DEFENDS EDGY HUMOR
The teaser doesn’t give us any fleshed-out bits, but we see a black Jesus figure and a black Alexander Graham Bell.
That kind of forced diversity wasn’t a part of the original film, but it’s essential in the new Hollywood. It also shatters any sense that we’re telling a story from the past.
View this post on Instagram
it’s one thing for “Hamilton” to embrace a multi-racial cast to make powerful points about the American experiment, and the flaws existing in the original United States. It’s different to force diversity in this way. It’s a distraction, period.
Will that Brooks magic make its way into the finished product? We’ll have eight episodes to see it once more. Brooks hasn’t made a feature film since 1995’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” underwhelmed us.
He’s kept busy since then, bringing his classic films to the Great White Way (“The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein”) with massive success.
Is Brooks willing to risk his no-holds-barred legacy with a woke “Part II?” He’s been firm on the fact that his 1974 classic “Blazing Saddles” couldn’t be made today thanks to Cancel Culture.
So far, the answer seems to be, “Yes,” but we’ll have to watch and find out come March 6.
UPDATE: “History” co-creator Nick Kroll confirms the show’s woke bent in a recent interview. Kroll, who also appears in the limited series, says Brooks’ comedy always punched up, a debatable assessment given so much of the icon’s work involved movie parodies.
“Mel’s ultimate goal was always to poke fun at those in power, and how greedy and how stupid they were,” Kroll said. “So, doing a show about history now at a time when we are reexamining the what the past was [and] how things went down, it became — for me — a very easy through line to continue Mel’s legacy at poking fun of those in power. And that really became our guiding light.”
Bell is played by Ike Barinholtz, who is white. The fact that the author of this couldn’t even decipher a your mama prank call joke is telling…
“who is this?”
“your mama”
“if you’re my mother what is your last name?”
“Bell”
“it is my mother that confirms it!”
More woke garbage from Mel Brooks. History of the World Part 1 was super woke too. Remember the diverse casting it that one? Go rewatch it. You, will be shocked. It has not dated well at all.
I briefly watched the trailer and honestly, from what I saw, it looked like they were making fun of the forced diversity aspect of a black Jesus in the “pitch meeting”. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what it looked like to me. That being said, it still looks like the Part II doesn’t have the same magic as Brooks’ earlier works.
I hope you’re right. HOTW P1 was a seminal movie of my childhood. The last supper scene with the Abbott & Costello bit is so GD funny. The bad Italian accent of DaVinci, etc. Of course it’s good to be the king.
What happened to Jews in space? I want my epic space battle!
“It’s Mega Maid. She’s gone from suck to blow” – Colonel Sandurz
Have you never seen Space Balls? What about the hotly anticipated sequel, “Space Balls 2: The Search for More Money”?
They are working on SB2……I think it should be called The Search for Schlock instead.
The Jew fighters in space were shaped like the star of David….Mega Main isn’t quite the same.
They would never make Spaceballs today. It’s too woke even for Hollywood.
There are lots of theories about why Disney is losing adult viewers: Maybe streaming services just aren’t what they used to be. More shows with a liberal spin with black and women stars while white men disappear, how about getting back to entertainment? We get a subtle Woke message that 3% of the population that is Homosexual, black or women are more interesting and better.
The trailer was funnier than I expected in light of Toto’s negative review. Sykes as Harriet Tubman cracked me up.
As for Black Jesus, he doesn’t even appear in the trailer. Even if he did, that’s no sign of “wokeness.” Jesus’ appearance has been debated for decades.
See this clip from the classic sitcom, Good Times:
https://youtu.be/pbmPB0QXzBI
Jesus (if he really existed) was Semitic! He was of the line of David! He certainly was not black, and he certainly did not look like the Northern European depictions popularized in Europe! He would have look very much like a current day Saphardic Jew.
Yup.
Jesus being played as black isn’t a sign of fatal wokeness. Imagine if a black Jesus was critical of the wokeness instead of its figurehead? That is how Brooks would’ve written it before 2015 and it likely would have been hysterical.
I’m not antiwoke, but I’m skeptical of watching History of the World Part 2. I hope they don’t screw up the events.
Why would you not be anti-woke? You’re not anti scolding people for minor trifles? You’re not anti pearl clutching? You’re not anti divisiveness? You’re not anti infantilizing minorities? What is a positive aspect of wokeness that can’t be handled through a less condescending method?
I can tell Mel Brooks was handcuffed by Disney when watching the trailer.
How could I overlook the fact that the EDI obsessed mouse owns Hulu? Well, another one down, I guess. What a shame because Mel in his prime would have been skewering the current woke mania.
The biggest surprise to me here is that Mel Brooks is still alive. What is he, 106 now?
He’s 94.
Yeah, from the moment I heard he was making this, it was going to be a woke disaster. I HOPE this will not be the case and he will be able to work in some classic Brooks moments, but I hold little hope to that hope. I have to say, as far as Dracula, dead and loving it, I thought it was actually FAR superior to the Men in Tights movie. Not his best of course, but a great way to end his cinema tenure. I believe it needs another look from Brooks fans.
It’s telling that Mel Brooks has grown from a race baiting pos and you all haven’t. It’s telling that his inclusion of others bothers you. You are racist scum. DIE.
Let’s play a game.
Take two larger boxes and place four smaller boxes in each. In one of the larger boxes place five marbles of different colors in each of the four smaller boxes so that all small boxes have a yellow, green, red, orange and blue marble in them. Wow, you say, we’ve created perfect diversity, not only in the smaller boxes, but in the larger box as well.
Now do the same with the smaller boxes in the second larger box, only in one of the smaller boxes instead of putting five differently colored marbles in, put four marbles of one color and one marble of any other color. Not equally diverse, you say? Now compare the pattern created within that big box to the pattern within the original large box. Which large box is more diverse and inclusive?
I understand the motive, but the premise is still racist. Saying how many of each color are allowed is still categorizing each ball by its color, aka racism. Anyone who pushes equal distribution of colors is still organizing by colors, hence racism. Ironically, they’re just so focused on the colors they’re blind to see they are the problem in the first place.
Who gives a sh*t really who cares about all the gaslighting that been going on for the past 2 years. Really who gives a fack about the pedo woke world they are at their end pssst they found more documents tell you what if the FBI raids all of Bidens homes then Obama’s then you can talk equity, diversity, and inclusion other than that nothing more to say
Great troll there…
He sure is.
You’re the actual racist P.O.S. Go back to Reddit you sick racist freak.
Please kys and help save the planey by reducing humanity’s carbon footprint.
What a moron! Blazing Saddles was a cutting edge commentary on racism of the time. Only an idiot would have called it racist. The problem with today is none of you over pampered, overgrown spoiled children have a sense of humor and you are perpetually offended.
Inserting races into places they don’t belong is nothing but stupid! Replacing a white historical figure with a black actor is just insulting! It infuriates me when I see minorities inserted into historical stories where they don’t belong, just to message some stupid peoples feelings!
Would you support inserting white people into a movie about pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa? Probably not!
Comedy has always been a way of pointing out problems in society, Laugh In, the original Saturday Night Live. None of of these shows would ever be made today.
I shutter to think how all you snowflakes would react if Frank Zappa was producing his music today. A man who left no one un-offended, and all of us laughed at his shows, White, black and in between. Black musicians like Ray White and Antonio Murphy Brown all played with Frank and never complained about his content!
Here, here. I was so excited to read about this sequel, but the trailer quickly disabused me of any eagerness as I recognized the woke tropes in almost every scene. What a shame and I’ll bet Mel at 96 didn’t write much of this. Reexamining a subject is a great thing, but color-washing history by using CRT techniques like “counter story telling” is dishonest and immoral. Look at all the commenters here calling others racists for accurately pointing out the objectively biased and identitarian content in that trailer. I voted for paw-paw too. smh
The correct acronym is “DEI”.
If you don’t know the meaning of a term, then don’t make a statement about it. If you do not live in the head of another person, do not ascribe motives, emotions, or values to them that they haven’t explicitly told you. Unless you want someone to call the police, do not explicitly call for a violent end. The refusal to follow the above two rules, proves a person is either a moron, a liar, or mentally unhinged.
You sound nice…single?
I’m Sorry, but how does casting a Black man(Cleavon Little) as the Cool HERO in a comedy that portrays the Racist characters led by Harvey Kormans’ character as total buffoons, constitute “Race Baiting”? Are you sure you don’t have things turned around too much?
Methinks Thou doth Protest too much.
The wokesters response to anything concerning race that doesn’t overtly signal their “ant-racist” ideology (which holds that all whites are guilty of benefitting from heretofore unproven open, hostile and ongoing “systemic racism”) is to lash out and condemn said production. It’s a dogmatic triggering of a Pavlovian response. No pun intended!
You’re not too perceptive, are you? Bless your heart.
Relax…it isn’t that serious.
The party of the KkK calling anyone racist is to funny lol. It’s called projecting. You do it with racism then you keep blacks in the ghetto where they are killed, you do it with Nazis yet you are the party that supports the government. You do it with the rich yet you are the party of big tech, big business, Hollywood which if you didn’t know are the richest people on earth. This is hard to believe but the richest people on earth are liberals. Ever wonder why they support a party who claims to hate them? They know you are full s***, we all know you are full of s*** you would sale your soul to the highest bidder if you had a soul. You would sale your children if you didn’t have them killed just as they were to be born. To say you are sick people is an understatement and you know this which is why you project so much.
Thank god for the Supreme Court’s which will stop you from destroying the country more then you already did.
@Keith Diggs: bless your heart.
Bet your the life of the party. Lighten up. Brooks made fun of everyone equally. That’s not racism. As you wish death on ppl because you can’t laugh at yourself.
Before you’ re just a gas a parties !
Wishing death on people is too woke !
Thats Harvey Corman..
That’s Korman.