Published by
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The comedy of Mel Brooks might as well be its own genre. It’s broad. It’s irreverent. It’s giddily absurd. And no more so than in the 1981 movie “History of the World, Part I,” wherein various events on the human timeline are filtered through this winking sensibility, transforming something like the Spanish Inquisition into a big splashy movie musical number, complete with an Esther Williams-inspired synchronized swimming routine. The Brooks mantra is blunt: Subtlety is for suckers; the more elaborate, the better. It also needs to be really funny. Sketch comedy is generally the provenance of t…
