History of the World, Part II began with a call from Mel Brooks to Nick Kroll.

“It’s the craziest thing in my life,” Kroll recalls, adding, “Mel Brooks is more important to me than anybody, so to get that call was like an out-of-body experience.” From there, Kroll reached out to Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz and his writing partner David Stassen. Together, the foursome, with Brooks, have hatched an update to Brooks’ seminal 1981 film, The History of the World, Part 1. Now, 42 years later, Part II will make its debut on Hulu as a four-night, eight episode event beginning March 6.

Like its predecessor, the sketch series offers its audience a tour through history, though this time the 96-year-old Brooks stars alongside Kroll, Sykes, Barinholtz and a who’s who of guest stars. Among the latter are Pamela Adlon, Quinta Brunson, Dove Cameron, Danny DeVito, Jay Ellis, Josh Gad, Johnny Knoxville, Charles Melton, Kumail Nanjiani, Andrew Rannells, Emily Ratajkowski, Sam Richardson, Nick Robinson, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman and Taika Waititi, to name just a few.

Ahead of the series’ premiere, Barinholtz spoke candidly about courting the aforementioned talent, collaborating virtually and working with his hero: “I mean, movies were not funny before him,” he says of Brooks.

So, how did History of the World: Part II come about for you?

Like most good things in Hollywood, it was a phone call from Nick Kroll. I’ve known Nick for a very long time. Do you remember they made a TV show based off of the Geico caveman [called Cavemen]? Well, we both auditioned for it. He got it, whatever. I guess he had a better take. (Laughs.) But we kept in touch after that. And then he reached out to my partner Dave Stassen and me about this opportunity. He was like, “I’ve got this show with Mel Brooks, History of the World: Part II.” And obviously I was all in, but I was just like, “Oh, interesting, keep talking. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, OK. Mel Brooks, I guess …” (Laughs.)

Was Wanda Sykes already involved at that point?

Yeah, Nick had already partnered up with Wanda, who I’d known for years. And then we all spent many months talking amongst ourselves about what we think this could be, and we kind of just kept saying, “It should just be like the movie.” Now, I’ve watched that movie, no joke, 100 times in my life. I know it all by heart and one thing I just thought was so cool about the movie is that you had some things, like the French Revolution, that lasted 20 minutes, and then you had things, like The 10 Commandments, which lasted one minute. We were like, “We should do that.” So, we decided on the four or five stories we wanted to give a little more real estate to and then we figured we’d do a ton of one-off sketches. And it was amazing. I have such reverence for Mel and the film, and I’m also a very, very big fan of history.

As we saw in your Celebrity Jeopardy travails…

Oh, I’m obsessed. It’s the only subject I did well in in school, and now every podcast I listen to is about history and almost every book I read is about history. I just love it. So, the thought of being able to do all of these sketches … Oh, you want Teddy Roosevelt? Got it. You want to play Ulysses S. Grant? Can do. And then we started the writing process and that’s always a very intimate thing and you never know exactly how it’s going to go. You may know someone socially or you’ve worked with them a little and then, all of a sudden, you’re in a writer’s room and you’re like, “This person is a crazy person and I need to not be with him.” (Laughs.) Fortunately, it was just the opposite with Nick and Wanda. And then there was the Mel of it all. Every week or so, you’d get Mel on a Zoom and you’d have him give you a couple of quick notes and then just be Mel Brooks.

What does a Mel Brooks note look like?

First, having him laugh at something you pitch is the greatest thing in the world. You’re just like, “I can die now. I did it.” Thankfully, he didn’t give too many comedy notes, but there were times where we pitched him things that were fairly esoteric, like, “Did you know about this guy?” And he was like, “Just play the hits.” And he was absolutely right. We were still able to get some voices that you haven’t really heard a lot or some POVS that you normally don’t get, but we’re not spending a lot of time saying to the audience, like, “This is the person who invented the combustion engine, which was important.” We needed to make sure the show was accessible. 

In many ways, that note is a reminder that you should be making mass-appeal entertainment, which, in some ways, is a throwback to Mel Brooks’ era.

Yeah, but we should actually still want the masses. The masses gave us a common culture, and that’s disappeared a bit now. There are so many different things to watch that you could sit with four people and each person, every 10 seconds, could be like, “Have you seen this?” “Have you seen that?” And the answer would be, “No.” The volume of shows, good shows, is staggering. I watched a show called Cunk on Earth last night, and I was crying laughing, but I’d never even heard of it before. So, it would be great to get back to a place where people are seeing the same thing, so that they can talk about it and have common references and stuff. Now, will that be History of the World? Who knows? Will we ever have it again? Who knows.

The other piece of a project like this is that you’re tasked with enlisting all of your famous friends. How comfortable were you with that part, and what did the process entail?

I remember we were meeting with the network or something about casting early on, and Nick says, “You guys are lucky because Ike Barinholtz and I have spent the last 10 years doing favors for everyone. So, now, it’s coming the other way!” (Laughs.)  

It’s payback time…

Exactly, and what we kept saying with the show is that it has to be big. You’re literally talking about the history of the world. And we’re also doing a TV sequel to a film that had a huge budget 42 years ago…

Without such a budget, presumably?

Yes, without that budget. (Laughs.) But we knew a big part of making it feel big would be in the casting, and so we were very ambitious. It was also very important to us that we were telling all kinds of stories. It couldn’t just be, like, “This is three white dudes’ guide to history, don’t worry about it.” And it couldn’t be just popping diverse actors into white centric storylines or Eurocentric storylines, but really also trying to find stories and POVs from people of color. In the end, I think we cast 300 parts in the show, which is wild. I want to give our casting people, like Tara David, an Oscar for this, even though it’s not a film. And it wasn’t just our friends. It was people we didn’t know, too. We were calling people’s reps and really pounding the pavement, selling people on the project. We were also dealing with the COVID of it all. This was still pretty heavy Covid, so there was a lot of, “This person just dropped out, we’ve got to call that person.” The casting was probably the hardest and most stressful part.

It seems like you had a lot of name writers come through, too. How did you go about casting that room?

Oh, it was an all-star lineup. We had folks like Ana Fabrega come in because we were just huge fans of Los Espookys and her writing and just her odd look at the world. And Guy Branum, who if we were all put on earth for a reason, you could argue he was put on earth to write the sketch TV show version of History of the World. We got Lance Crouther, who was Chris Rock’s old writer and he was Pooty Tang, and to have him around and get his POV on stuff was amazing. Janelle James gave us a few weeks in the room right as Abbott Elementary was coming out, and it was amazing to watch, over Zoom, her kind of realize that she was becoming incredibly famous. Adam Countee [who wrote on The Mindy Project with Barinholtz] came for a few weeks, and Joe Mande. All these amazing writers would come and some were with us for three, four months and some would just come for a week.

The room was largely virtual, which, I have to presume, is an added challenge, particularly in comedy?

Yeah, when it comes to story breaking, Zoom is not good. You really need to be in the room with people. It requires such patience and discipline, and if you’re on a Zoom, it’s just so easy to check out. So, we did our best. We really tried to run a really tight but pleasant ship, where it was like, the [Zoom] room starts at 10:15 a.m. and we’re going to take a break about 90 minutes later, and then we’re going to take a proper lunch break where we want people to leave. Sometimes people were like, “Eh, we’ll just work through lunch.” No, you need to shut your shit off and eat your sandwich and go on TikTok or whatever. It’s also very important that, unless there’s something catastrophic going on, we end at five o’clock. I find that on Zoom, you get diminished returns. But just in general, I also think it is very important for writers, especially comedy writers, not to always be in the room. Your whole fucking job is to relate to people and come up with things that they understand and they can relate to and if you are just in a writer’s room, you’re not going to get that. So, it’s important to go home and be with your kids, go on a date, go out to dinner, go watch a show and we were very regimented about that.

You are making comedy in a more sensitive cultural environment. Do you find yourself checking yourself either pitching or in the writers room in ways that you wouldn’t have when you were starting out?

Yes, in the sense that, first of all, you’re on Zoom, at least for History of the World, which is, you never know. But if you’ve built a good room where people aren’t reactionary and they understand what we’re doing. And we had a little code in that room, where would say, “That makes me feel a little itchy,” and if someone said itchy, we’d stop and talk about it. The rooms that get in trouble are the ones where the showrunner is waiting to go off on the younger staff, or the younger staff is, like, “I’m gonna Tweet about my boss.” I remember hearing someone say, “Oh, if you want to be a writer in this business, get on Twitter.” But I think it’s the opposite. If I’m looking for writers and someone’s like, “I’m not on Twitter,” I’m already so much more into them than someone who is. 

So, is there going to be a Part III? Or have we exhausted the world’s story?

Well, listen, we overwrote. We have a lot more that we wanted to do…