Drunk History
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
The premise is right in the title. Comedians get genuinely drunk and narrate a historical event while famous actors lip sync every slurred word in lavish period reenactments. Derek Waters hosts, coaxing the narrators through bottle after bottle, and the genius is that the history underneath is completely real. The drunker the storyteller gets, the harder the reenactment actors commit to the hiccup, the tangent, and the wrong name, and the funnier the whole thing becomes.
Across six seasons and seventy episodes on Comedy Central the format never changed and never needed to. Waters built each episode around a city or a theme, and the reenactments recruited real star power willing to say absurd things with a completely straight face. The ratio holds for the whole run: about a third of the segments are good, a third are decent, and a handful every season are among the funniest things the channel ever aired.
It ended in 2019, and nothing has really replaced it. The show works because it treats history the way a drunk person actually remembers it, with the passion intact and the details gone missing. If the idea makes you laugh even a little, the show will too, from the first slurred word to the last.
