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influences the style of later comedies set in the remote or legendary past,
like Black Knight (2001) and the Shrek films (2001, 2004). Comic anachronism
in the Roman Empire sequence also works backwards to the ancient
Greeks, when Josephus is walking down the Roman street and amazingly
meets old blind Oedipus, a mythological character from a Greek tragedy
who notoriously slept with his own mother, greeting him with “Hey,
mother-fucker,” a joke that “somehow appears both highbrow and lowbrow
at the same time” (Crick, 127). Like Comicus, who saves the horse
Miracle from being struck in the opening scene, Brooks refuses to “beat
a dead horse,” as his groundbreaking, instinctive approach extracts the
maximum effect out of visual and verbal comedy.
Themes and Interpretations
History of the World, Part I enjoyed great box-office success: at a cost of an
estimated $11 million, the film had a total domestic box-office gross of
over $31 million. All of Brooks’ cinematic parodies of popular genres,
including his satire of the Roman epic blockbuster at the beginning of
History of the World, Part I, have both social point and psychological
meaning. Brooks, an avid student of Freudian psychology, often explains
his comedy as a revolt against repression, or an eruption of repressed
human desires (Yacowar, 1–8). When powerful tensions are kept from
being openly expressed, building up in a society or a person, they tend to
emerge in the more neutral imagery of jokes, dreams, art, and other cultural
structures. Such repressed tensions are probed in Brooks’ lampoons
of familiar film genres: “Like Freudian analysis of an individual psyche,
Brooks’ genre parodies psychoanalyze the culture for which these genres
express unresolved tensions” (Yacowar, 167). Thus, the film parodies reveal
to our conscious mind whatever we have suppressed in the deep
subconscious. The Roman Empire sequence of History of the World, Part I
exposes the violence, brutality, and overt sexuality that are veiled behind
the conventions of the supposedly “noble” and “historical” epic film. Such
traditional genre pieces are what Freud would call “substitute gratifications,”
or indirect expressions of buried tensions. Brooks does not just mimic the
conventions of the epic film genre; rather, he investigates those cinematic
fictions in order to identify what the epic film simultaneously articulates
and obscures, for example, the cruelty and carnality of the ancient
Romans. As Comicus learns: “When you die at the Palace, you really die at
the Palace.” When a Brooks film divulges the truth, however unpalatable
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