Write. Watch. Repeat: For ‘History of the World Part II’ Creator David Stassen, Comedy Takes Flight the Second (or Eighth?) Time Around

This interview was conducted in April 2023.

Writer and executive producer David Stassen can’t stop watching History of the World Part II. He’s proud of what he helped create, of course, but he also finds new things crack him up during each viewing.

“Our brains are designed to look for plot, but with comedy, it’s all about the jokes. Comedy gets better the more you watch it,” he said.

After the first viewing, our brains know the story so we can notice the jokes more. “Comedy deserves to be watched more than once… I think I liked History of the World Part II more the eighth time I watched it.”

Airing on Hulu, the eight-episode series is both an extension of writer-director Mel Brooks’s 1981 film History of the World Part I and an homage to Brooks’s see-what-schticks style of comedy.

Stassen and collaborators Ike Barinholtz, Nick Kroll, and Wanda Sykes at first weren’t sure how to approach the project. “I think we were hesitant. We wanted to respect Mel,” Stassen said of the comedy legend, who turns 97 this year. “He had no rules.”

Brooks had been thinking about doing a sequel to History of the World Part I for a while, but it wasn’t until he met Kroll through Kroll’s Broadway show Oh, Hello that the idea gained traction. Kroll is a huge fan of Brooks, and soon other friends and writers such as Sykes came aboard.

“Every time I mention Mel’s name, I can’t believe I know him. I call him one of my first babysitters,” said Stassen, who grew up watching Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles (and associating the horrendous Spanish Inquisition with Brooks’s catchy song-and-dance number in spite of himself).

Much like the original movie, the series follows four overarching stories—a love story between Jesus (Jay Ellis) and Mary Magdalene (Zazie Beetz), the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and activist and politician Shirley Chisholm—between one-off sketches peppered with Brooks’s narration. Viewers pop in on Shakespeare’s writing room, catch Hitler on ice (he falls constantly), and sample the “Kama Souptra,” where the writer (Kumail Nanjiani) thinks the recipes are the draw, only to be told otherwise.

True to Brooks’s irreverent style, the show has obvious gags such as Harriet Tubman (Sykes) running the Underground Railroad through the New York City subway system and cheeky bits such as Robert E. Lee (Jack McBrayer) striking his colleagues in their confederates while signing the treaty at Appomattox.

Yet it also blends clever bits of storytelling style. Laborer Schmuck Mudman (Kroll) experiences the Russian Revolution while the oblivious Princess Anastasia Romanov (Dove Cameron) vlogs. Jesus and his Apostles form a band whose bickering “Last Supper Sessions” call to mind director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. Chisholm (Sykes again) takes on racism in politics in a 1970s Norman Lear-style sitcom called Shirley that brings President Richard Nixon to dinner, features Chisholm singing, and … Is that Marla Gibbs of The Jeffersons as her mother?

Yes, Stassen said, it is.

Speaking of Chisholm, how did this modern woman—the first African-American woman elected to Congress and co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus—wind up as a main storyline alongside those older events? Sykes is a huge fan of hers, but she also has “an underdog story that is so Mel. There’s nothing more Mel than punching up,” Stassen said.

Brooks often punched down, too—he’s an equal-opportunity pugilist—but the History of the World Part II team was careful about following the lead he established in Blazing Saddles. There, Brooks skewers the settlers in the Western town of Rock Ridge not for being poor but because they’re racist buffoons.

“I think that you can punch down if you establish that these salt-of-the-earth people are terrible racists,” Stassen said.

Although the creatives found lots of inspiration in each other, the project still had its challenges, such as meeting, hiring, and writing over Zoom during the pandemic. Stassen said he didn’t realize how tiring all that would be. “There’s more of an expiration date each day on what your brain and your eyes can handle.”

For pre-production, the team masked up to test their sketches and ideas in person because being around one another was gold. “One thing that fascinated us was how incredibly awful life was until about 1940, before the polio vaccine and plumbing… Life is so terrible, you have to laugh at it.”

Aside from getting feedback on their work, Stassen encouraged writers of any genre to stick with it. “Keep writing. You get better the more you do it. I’m a better writer today than I was a month ago. I think I’ll be a better writer in a month than I am today,” he said.

Whether there’s more satirical history to share he won’t say, although the series ends with a “preview” of The Great Fascist Bake Off and Jews in Space. Brooks, meanwhile, has been sweet, kind, and supportive. “He’s a lot less intimidating than two years ago when I first met him,” Stassen said. “We did not take lightly this task of taking on this title. We felt the pressure to not have Mel say it sucks….

“I’m happy to report he thinks the show is decent.”

History of the World Part 2 is now streaming on Hulu.