'History of the World, Part II' review: The school of Mel is in session

If you don't count the years when he worked as a drummer, a "tummler" and a teenage comic in the Catskills, Mel Brooks began his show business career in television, writing for Sid Caesar at the dawn of the medium. He returned in the mid-1960s to co-create "Get Smart," and now he is back again, with Hulu's "History of the World, Part II," a sequel to his 1981 film "History of the World, Part I."

That film, a series of sketches set in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, the Spanish Inquisition and Revolutionary France, is not the one by which he will be best remembered, or would likely want to be,