Drunk History

Drunk History Comedy Central (2013- )


There is a silly television show called “Drunk History” on a cable network in which comedians consume alcohol to the point of drunkenness and then re-tell the story of some historical incident or personality.  Well-known actors reenact the story and lip-sync to the narration of the drunken storyteller, with absolutely meticulous fidelity to the words of the storyteller, belches and all.  There is a hidden secret as to what makes the premise of the show intriguing.  The reenactments are not faithful to “historical fact”.  Instead, they are faithful to the inebriated ramblings of the storyteller.  The historical accounts are like myths.  The drunk storytellers clearly have some sort of script in hand, and have done some amount of research beforehand.  But they act (or maybe really are) too drunk to tell the story in an articulate and nuanced manner.  So the show dramatizes the myth in a way that makes the act of mythologization evident–that’s the funny part.  This is like the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  It also makes the show a “pragmatic reflective history,” according the G.W.F. Hegel in Reason in History (1837), because it “nullifies the past and makes the event present.”