Drunk History is Back🍸

And there is microhistory everywhere!

I am over the moon to hear that Drunk History is back; I love this show.

There really isn’t anything quite like it. The premise alone is brilliant: take someone who knows a historical story, get them drunk, let them tell it in whatever increasingly chaotic way it comes out, and then have actors & comedians in full costume reenact every word, pause, mistake, and drunken theatre exactly as the narrator tells it.

It’s hilarious, but the history itself isn’t the joke. In fact, some of the historical biographies they choose are excellent.

The show rarely tries to explain an entire century. Instead, it grabs hold of one person, one strange event, one forgotten fight, one invention, one scandal, or one remarkable day and burrows into it. Sometimes the subject is famous, but just as often the story belongs to someone most viewers have never heard of.

That is exactly what makes microhistory and reconstruction so addictive.

You start small. Maybe you have one woman, one court case, one letter, or one bizarre incident that seems almost insignificant next to the enormous events filling the history books. Then you get close to it. You find out who these people are, what happens to them, and what is happening around them.

Suddenly, that tiny story opens a door into an entire world.

Peasants Dancing and Feasting — David Teniers the Younger, c. 1660

The show introduces viewers to people such as Harriet Tubman, Mary Shelley, Claudette Colvin, Edith Wilson, Nellie Bly, Sybil Ludington, Bass Reeves, Florence Nightingale, and dozens of others whose lives could easily support biographies of their own. Even when the name is familiar, the story often isn’t.

That’s one of the show’s great tricks. You sit down expecting to laugh, and twenty minutes later you realize you’ve become completely invested in someone who died 150 years ago. Awesome.

I understand that feeling very well.

History Told the Way People Actually Tell Stories

There is also something wonderfully human about how these stories are told.

Academic history has its place, and good documentation matters enormously, but people have been passing history to one another around tables, fires, and drinks for a very long time. We don’t always begin with dates and footnotes.

We begin with, “You have to hear what happened to this woman.”

Then comes the story.

That’s the heart of Drunk History. The narrator knows the subject and genuinely cares about the story they’re telling. Once the alcohol loosens everything up, that affection becomes incredibly funny, but it can also be strangely moving. Narrators get angry about injustices that happened centuries ago. They defend their historical figures and become outraged on their behalf. Sometimes you can see they desperately want you to understand why this person matters.

Strip away the drinking, and that impulse is very familiar to anyone who has ever fallen deeply into historical research.

You find someone, learn their story, and eventually start telling other people, “No, seriously. You have to hear this.”

And Now It’s Back

The original run of Drunk History began on Comedy Central in 2013 and ran for six seasons. A seventh season was ordered, but production was halted by the COVID shutdown, and the series went quiet.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of it.

Derek Waters has brought Drunk History back with three new short-form stories for Comedy Central’s YouTube channel, and I love the choices for its return because they showcase exactly what this series does so well.

The first takes us into pop-culture history with Madonna’s notorious performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, with Meghan Trainor portraying Madonna.

Then there is Frances Perkins, exactly the sort of biography Drunk History is made for.

Perkins became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor in 1933, making her the first woman to serve in a U.S. presidential cabinet. Long before that, she witnessed the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, an experience that shaped her commitment to labor reform. She eventually became one of the central figures in major New Deal labor and social-welfare policies.

That’s an extraordinary American life, yet many people have never heard her name.

Give me that story.

The costumes and famous actors are fun. The drunken narration is hysterical. But underneath all of it are carefully chosen human stories, many about people who deserve a little more room in our collective memory.

They are courageous, petty, brilliant, jealous, stubborn, funny, reckless, and sometimes completely fed up. They make terrible decisions and occasionally astonishing ones. They fall in love, hold grudges, get into fights, break rules, challenge people more powerful than themselves, and sometimes change history without ever becoming household names.

That’s the past I love digging into.

Not history sitting quietly on a pedestal, but history with people put back into it.

So yes, I’m genuinely excited that Drunk History is back!

Thousands of extraordinary lives still sit in the records, waiting for someone to tell their story.

Preferably someone who’s had a few drinks. ;)

The return of Drunk History premieres today, Tuesday, September 15, 2026, on the Comedy Central YouTube Channel.