by VorJack
As a Public Historian, I’m always looking for ways to make history more accessible to the general public. This isn’t it.
Still, some folks have mentioned that I spend a lot of time talking about early American history. Since I’m currently working in that field, its kind of hard to get away away from it. So I thought maybe I could help people get up to speed on American history in a quick and painless fashion. Well, maybe not so painless.
Presenting “Drunk History.” This is a series of clips tied to an HBO production, a couple years old now. The purpose of these clips is fairly straight-forward:
- Find a comedian who thinks he knows something about history
- Get them totally schnockered
- Have them recount a story from American history
- Reenact that retelling with the help of Hollywood
Why? Uh … huh … say, how about another rum and coke?
So here’s Eric Falconer, telling the famous story of Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with electricity, and reenacted with Jack Black as Franklin.
Contains copious profanity. Oh, and whenever Falconer says he’s going to go throw up … yeah, you may just want to skip ahead about twenty seconds.
I still want to know who thought this was a good idea. I suppose the next step would be to do biblical history.
Sort of reminds me of that drunk guy at the bar who always says things like,
“Communism sounded like a good idea on paper but it’ll never work in real life,”
or,
“I’m not sayin’ Hitler had the right idea but…”
or, how about this one after a few pints,
“Mayan Calender” (really that’s all I have to hear to quit listening)
The one about Oney Judge is funnier, imo.
Couldn’t agree *HIC* more.
Peurile, childish bullshit – but no worse than what Holywood does to everybody else’s history.
For example: “U-571″, the story of an American submarine crew boarding a U-boat during World War 2 to capture an Enigma machine and code-book. Except it WASN’T an American crew that did it, Pearl Harbour hadn’t happened yet and the capture of the device and book was one of the primary reasons that the US agreed to join in the fight in Europe. The people who really carried out that mission were the British Royal Navy. To quote the Guardian:
“At the time of its release, Tony Blair condemned U-571 in parliament as an insult to the Royal Navy. A far more entertaining response would have been for Britain to fund a big-budget revenge epic, in which a small platoon of foppish yet plucky Brits swans over to Vietnam in 1968, defeats the Viet Cong, and wins the war. Moreover, it would be nearly as accurate as this.”
Holywood even steals other people’s f*ck-ups. Look at Michael Bay’s “Transformers” and pay attention to the line about “NASA’s Beagle Probe to Mars”. NASA had bog-all to do with Beagle, Beagle was an ESA mission.
I f*cking hate Holywood.
/rant.
Don’t day that Braveheart isn’t true …
…. erm, that should be say not day!
If it was, the statue of William Wallace that was based on Mel Gibson’s image probably wouldn’t be behind security fencing…
Holywood even steals other people’s f*ck-ups. Look at Michael Bay’s “Transformers” and pay attention to the line about “NASA’s Beagle Probe to Mars”. NASA had bog-all to do with Beagle, Beagle was an ESA mission.
They had to since theirs missed Mars completely.
messed the link on the last one.
You don’t recognize humour when you see it?
I think a lot of people don’t even know half as much history as these drunk people. It’s only funny because they are drunk, not because they kind of fuzzed over the details. If you listen to what sober people know about history… wait, I think that is one of Jay Leno’s bits. SEE ALSO: Sarah Palin.
Drunk history = funny.
Sober history = scary.
I do recognise humour. I like a laugh. But I don’t find the sight of a drunken idiot spouting shit to be all that funny unless I too ma drunk. I stick to my original assertion that the whole thing is peurile.
“Biblical history” is an oxymoron, but it would be a hoot to retell and dramatize the bullshit in the bible, especially drunk. One might argue that the bible stories were originally told by drunks in a bar: “OK, Abraham’s sittin’ outside his tent, and God walks by, tells him to kill his son and cut off the end of his dick”, “There’s this big fucking flood”, “So Davis smacks Goliath in the head with a big fucking rock”, “So God sends his son down to be killed, and this fixes things…somehow”.
Typical bar rants on a Saturday night.
This show is hilarious. There’s some great comedy on hbo right now. My girlfriend and I look forward to Funny or Die and the Ricky Gervais Show every week.
Link fail on the UF link referred to in the article. Actually the link doesn’t fail; a UF page comes up with a nice note that the search doesn’t produce any results. The search it suggests comes up with this article, and a few others that don’t match the description.
It looks more like a paste fail – the link to the site is pasted partway through the redirecting link rather than instead of it.
Fixed. I have no idea what was wrong with it – the code looked fine – but I retyped it and it works now.
Odd. WordPress just doesn’t like me sometimes.