History of the World: Part I

It’s Brooks’s audacity -- his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke, and doing it in a low-comedy context -- that gives History the kick that was missing from his last few films.

"History of the World, Part 1" is one of the all-time great spoof comedies. Its genius can be seen right there in its title.

What [Brooks] takes to be the glorious folk humor that modern people have repressed looks to many of us like the tired jokes that were yawned off the burlesque stage 50 years ago.

Mel Brooks's movie History of the World, Part 1 is a rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure from one of the most gifted comic filmmakers around.

... an entertaining mishmash of skits which finds Mel Brooks back in lively form, both for better and for worse.

As with many of the writer/director/producer’s works, not every gag lands (a couple actually fall quite flat), with a few portions meandering a touch, but several definitely stand out, sure to endure.

History of the World: Part I is Mel Brooks at his most appealing since The Producers and Young Frankenstein... This is just the sort of harmless, frequently hilarious summer movie that will appeal to adolescents of all ages.

As written and directed by Brooks, the movie's overreliance on sex, scat and Semitic jokes wears painfully thin halfway through the picture.

History of the World, Part I-which has no sequel-spoofs multiple genres in this anthology showing that there are no limits to the mind of writer-director Mel Brooks.