In a recent episode of “Drunk History,” on Comedy Central, Ashley Nicole Black—a writer for “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee”—told the stirring story of how Nichelle Nichols, the African-American actress who played Uhura, on “Star Trek,” helped to integrate NASA. But first Black got tanked with Derek Waters, the show’s host. “To infinity and beyond!” Waters announced. “No,” she said, quizzically, but not unkindly. “Live long and prosper.” Then she taught Waters the Vulcan salute—unable to hold his fingers together, he kept drifting into a much dirtier gesture, “the shocker.” The two giggled, because the situation was ridiculous. There was nothing to get mad about.
“Drunk History” is that kind of show: sweet, filthy, and forgiving. It’s a safe space, from before that term was turned into a partisan weapon. It’s informational, but it doesn’t mind that you don’t know everything, because it gets that nobody does. This openheartedness makes it educational television in a broader, emotional sense—it’s like “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” or “Schoolhouse Rock!,” if those shows had more orgies and Nazis. Like “Star Trek,” it’s a vision of cosmopolitan democracy, right as that ideal is under threat. This Fourth of July, the show made for a surprisingly affecting binge-watch, offering some perspective from the bottom of a shot glass. What was I gonna watch instead, “The Handmaid’s Tale”?
The premise is simple. Each episode has a theme—say, heists or civil rights. There are three segments. In each, Waters teams up with a guest storyteller, who is often a comedian. (Every human who has ever done a podcast seems to have appeared during the show’s five seasons.) Many guests are comparative randos, although the current season also features stars like Questlove, Tiffany Haddish, and Rachel Bloom. In a kitchen, Waters and the narrator mix drinks, chitchat, and get to know each other. Once a buzz has been established, the scene moves to the living room, where the guest tells whatever story is on the agenda: maybe it’s about a “ghost army” that artists built during the Second World War, to distract the Germans, or about the 1963 Children’s March, in Birmingham, Alabama, or about an extremely weird medieval trial involving rats. Some stories are slight and others meaty, but they often feature details that would be relegated to footnotes in more standard histories. (Did you know that one of the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary, W. C. Minor, was a murderer confined to a mental asylum? I did not.)
As the drunk guest narrates, we cut back and forth to a fully produced docudrama, starring other semi-familiar names (Weird Al Yankovic, as Adolf Eichmann; Abbi Jacobson, as Gloria Steinem; Method Man, as Grandmaster Flash). These sequences aren’t scripted; instead, the actors lip-synch the words of the drunk person, which means that the dialogue continually adjusts to pauses, burps, and impaired tangents. Just as you get into the swing of the story of Rasputin, for instance, the tsarina gets lost trying to pronounce “aristocracy.” “Aristococracy—aristocross—aristocrocity,” a sloshed Chris Romano mutters, as the actress who plays the tsarina karaokes along. “I need a fucking word.”
Silly in theory, strangely effective in practice. The lip-synching makes the show pleasurably unpredictable; it also puts the darker bits at a distance, in a way not unrelated to the reasons that people drink in the first place. Although “Drunk History” has solid production qualities (and an assortment of mustaches to rival that of “The Americans”), it disguises itself as amateur hour: an anecdote told badly, acted in a goofy way, broken up by dad jokes, but beautifully edited. The result is that we are immersed in the specific charisma of each speaker, from the flinty zeal of Paget Brewster to the cool swagger of Mark Gagliardi, in a way that suggests the show’s unspoken theme. On “Drunk History,” history is a game of telephone—one that we’re all participating in, whether we like it or not.
In other words, “Drunk History” is a corrective to the oracular, authoritative, we-know-better tone of most historical nonfiction. Even the best documentaries present themselves as definitive, and this is part of their appeal—to learn, consult an expert. Expertise is trustworthy, which often means that it’s stiff and it doesn’t wiggle. While “Drunk History” is often uplifting, it doesn’t skirt the tough stuff: stories have included slavery and the internment of Japanese-Americans. But it wiggles all over the place, and, because the method is Scotch straight up, the tonal possibilities expand. Outrage and excitement, as well as anxiety and doubt, are welcome here, not as impairments but as intensifiers. Emotion seeps to the surface. Alison Rich gets weepy talking about the Pill. Tiffany Haddish shouts with joy about the rescue of some paintings from the Nazis. “Our genitals are these fucking question marks dingly-dangling off of the front of our fucking weirdo mashed-potato bodies” is how Gabe Liedman summarizes Alfred Kinsey’s theories.
Waters encourages the hosts throughout, making small jokes, as any good listener would. He teases and gets teased, but he never humiliates anyone. People often apologize for being drunk (“I’m way drunker than I thought” is a frequent refrain); once in a while, someone goes overboard and throws up or passes out—though this was more common in an earlier, fascinatingly raw version of the show, which appeared on Funny or Die. Whenever that kind of disaster does happen, it’s treated with an astonishing compassion, gilding the show in warmth and humility. Similarly, during rare moments when someone resists Waters, or gets competitive about jokes, it feels as interesting as the historical elements. At times, the show seems to be as much about the delicacy of talking to a near-stranger as it is about anything else. That feels political, too.
Effortlessness like this takes craft. Drunkenness is not enough, which we know for certain, since the experiment has been tried across the Atlantic. The British “Drunk History”—which you can catch in clips on YouTube—is terrible. It’s depressing. It’s not funny, but that’s not really the problem. It has the same setup: a tanked performer tells a story, which is acted out, via lip-synch, by actors in costume. But there’s no host, no I-Thou dynamic—and therefore no intimacy, no compassion—and so it becomes a show about drinking alone, in public. It’s a show about exposure, not vulnerability. Instead of Waters, we get a horribly chipper narrator (Jimmy Carr), who records a voice-over but who never meets the guest drinkers. Those poor dupes are just shown in the kitchen or the living room, as the screen displays what they drank, like court testimony after a frat hazing. Perhaps as a result, the storytellers are more frequently bored, glib, or snide, the tones people adopt when they’re afraid. In one segment, about the criminals the Kray twins, the storyteller makes a dumb fart joke. He begs the cameras, “Please don’t use that!,” then pauses, drops his eyes, and adds, abashed, “You’re going to have to use that, aren’t you?” No one responds. It’s hard to create chemistry with Big Brother.
It’s easy to create chemistry with Derek Waters, who is an undercelebrated gift to television, very much in the tradition of Fred Rogers—the host as role model. He’s handsome in an accessible way, like a friend’s brother you meet at a wedding. He has dark hair and sympathetic eyes, and he’s not skinny and not fat. Unsurprisingly, he strikes sparks with everyone; this season, during an episode with Mae Whitman, the two ended up swaying in a doorway, seemingly on the verge of kissing. But there’s romance in more platonic interactions, too. Waters maintains a connection even when his guest goes meta, letting us see the frame beyond the frame. “I feel the magic has been taken out of my soul and put onto display,” Mark Gagliardi mumbles from the couch, in one episode. “Well, that’s what happens when you do television,” Waters says, companionably, as he cleans the sink. He drinks, but he doesn’t get drunk. He gets just drunk enough. “To you and me” is the way he begins one toast. There are worse mottoes. ♦
