‘Drunk History’ Review & Recap: Hilarious History With Slurred Words

Season three of the hit show, Drunk History, is a beautiful ode to the Garden State with the premier episode titled “New Jersey.” These are the obscure stories of the heroes who didn’t exactly make New Jersey what it is today, but definitely made names for themselves while throwing dirt at each other or trying to figure out where that weird sound in the sky is coming from.

Tess Lynch talks about the Union Balloon Corp during the Civil War. Thaddeus Lowe is a hot air balloon pioneer and gets blown by indifferent winds from Hoboken to South Carolina. He ends up having to use his “important balloon person” documentation to convince the confederacy that he is not a Union spy. Just when Lowe is about to give up on his balloon flying dreams, he gets a letter from a mysterious person in Washington D.C. He goes to where he is summoned and discovers that his meeting is with “f**kin’ Abe Lincoln” himself. Lincoln convinces Lowe to use his hot air balloons to spy on the Confederacy. After some government help, Lowe has “like, a billion balloons” and starts the first air force. Greg Kinnear plays an animated and hilarious Lowe and Stephen Merchant plays F**kin’ President Lincoln.

Mark Proksch talks about The Bone Wars, fought between the first paleontologists, Othneil Marsh (Christopher Meloni) and Edward Cope (Tony Hale). “New Jersery” is where the first dinosaur discovery is made and it isn’t long before Marsh starts paying people to keep Cope away from further discoveries. Cope responds by pillaging Marsh’s dig sites. Marsh makes fun of Cope saying “Einstein isn’t invented yet, but you’re no Einstein!” Dirtball fights follow between the two which last for about 15 years until Marsh becomes the head of paleontology in the U.S.. Cope is able to sabotage his enemies fancy new desk job by proving that Marsh is sabotaging science and Marsh is ruined. Cope decides he wants his brain cut out when he dies to be measured up against Marsh’s brain for intelligence. Marsh chickens out on the brain bet.

Jenny Slate takes us back to 1960, a time when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson commandeer an obsolete scientific instrument to start listening to the cosmos. They discover a background noise that is coming from everywhere in the sky at once. It isn’t New York City, and it isn’t the sun. They even fire a shotgun into the device to kill some pigeons living inside it, but the noise won’t die. Cosmic microwave background radiation is the real culprit which is residual sound from the big bang. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson (Jason Ritter and Justin Long) win the Nobel Prize for proving the Big Bang happened.

Once again, Drunk History lives up to it’s name and brings us our past in the form of slurred words, cuss words, “likes” and “ums.”

Pictured: Greg Kinnear and Stephen Merchant