History of the World: Part I

“Ten million years in the making. The truth, the whole truth, and everything, but the truth!”

Mel Brooks plays five parts in his own anthology, among them Moses, the stand-up philosopher Comicus, and Torquemada. He drops them into the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution, with Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero, Madeline Kahn as Empress Nympho and Harvey Korman as Count de Monet. Brooks treats nothing in the history books as too serious to laugh at, and he has the whole cast working that way too.