History Of The World Part I (1981) * * 1/2

Directed by:  Mel Brooks

Starring:  Mel Brooks, Gregory Hines, Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Dom DeLuise, Mary Margaret-Humes, Shecky Greene

History Of The World Part I has many funny scenes and other bits which fall quite short of funny.    It's chock full of Brooks' humor, consisting of puns, raunch, double entendres, and slapstick.    Regardless of the result,  Brooks gives plenty of effort.    He tries harder to get laughs than just about any comic director in history.    

The film is divided up into four sections:   The Stone Age, The Roman Empire, The Inquisition, and The French Revolution.     The Roman and French segments actually have plots, while the other segments ungainly fit in musical numbers.     Brooks himself appears in three of the segments, while the rest feature actors who have appeared in other Brooks movies (Korman, Ron Carey, Leachman, Kahn, and DeLuise).    

The Stone Age segment begins with Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (also featured in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)     Men rise along with the sun and immediately begin jerking off, which is accompanied by a subtitle, "Our Forefathers".    Very funny.    The rest of the segment is hit and miss, although I like how the critic responds to a cave painting. 

The Roman Empire features Brooks as an out-of-work "stand-up philosopher" who gets on the bad side of a piggish Roman emperor (DeLuise) and goes on the run.    This is the longest and funniest of the segments, which includes Gregory Hines in his film debut as a runaway slave who can dance and Madeline Kahn as Empress Nympho, who holds orgies which advertise, "First Serve, First Come".    Moses even makes an appearance along with a parting Red Sea.     This is an anachronism, to be sure, but it's a good laugh.

The weakest segment is The Inquisition, which is a overly long musical number featuring Brooks as the infamous Torquemada.     Besides an early chuckle, The Inquisition makes the fatal mistake of thinking that having dancing nuns and priests in and of itself is funny.    It tries to make light of the tortures of non-Christians by the Catholics, but flops.    I don't think it ever had a chance.

The French Revolution contains some pretty good yuks, including a plot in which King Louis XVI is replaced by a lookalike "piss boy" (both roles played by Brooks) in order to escape Paris on the eve of the 1789 French Revolution.      The plan is hatched by Count DeMoney (Korman), a snobby aristocrat who repeatedly corrects people who mispronounce his name.  ("Dee-Mo-Nay").    He informs the king, "You look like the piss boy!"   To which the king replies, "And you look like a bucket of shit!"    I enjoyed the inspired lunacy here.

The epilogue shows us a fake trailer for "History Of The World, Part II", but this was meant as a gag.   There was never a Part II in the works.    What can I say about Part I except I laughed, but not consistently.     Brooks' Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety were more consistently funny and inspired.     History Of The World Part I has parts that work and others that made me groan.