So, I am about the zillionth person to think about how we use history in popular culture. For instance, my sister-in-law Rachel Richardson (who just finished her Ph.D. and got married - congrats on an epic 2014, Rachel!) is a historian who works for a publisher and thus a much bigger expert than I on this stuff.

The thing that just struck me is the trend of silly, earthy, exuberant, sentimental, loving, infernokrusher and literally fantastic retellings of our history, especially retellings that give us wish-fulfillment. I never saw or read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, but it seems to be all of a piece with Drunk History and "Hark! A Vagrant".

Like so many people in my demographic cohort, I cherish sincere earnestness, emotional vulnerability, and intense enthusiasm. Drunk History uses alcohol to bring out these characteristics in its narrators, and I love it.

In a recent Drunk History episode, the cops dragging hard-done-by civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin off the bus say to her: "It's 1955, and we don't have to do [bleep]." (She frustratedly responds, [bleep] [bleep] 1955.") Later, narrator Amber Ruffin drunkenly mispronounces "Birmingham" as "Burning Man", causing Colvin to say "You know what, [bleep] this, I'm moving to Burning Man." The dramatization obediently surrounds Colvin, standing on a sidewalk in Montgomery, Alabama, with dirt-smeared dancers bopping to techno beats. This is sublime. Claudette Colvin had a really hard time! I want her to have fun! I want 1950s-era Colvin to be able to say "screw it, I'm going to Burning Man" and leave behind racist oppression! This wish does not make sense and we know it's nonsense; it is so hyperbolically impossible that the image works as wish fulfillment without implying that anyone could have cured racism in this way. If you watch all the way to the credits, you see that Colvin laughs as one of the dancers drapes a garland around her neck. It's like the future coming back in time to bless her.

Kate Beaton, like the Drunk History narrators, has historical characters speak their subtext (examples: Ida B. Wells, various explorers, Perry and Henson, Juarez and Maximilian, Kosciuszko, World War I generals). Many of these narratives -- Beaton's comics and Drunk History both -- share this bathetic anachronistic conversational style, and the figures we view today as heroes tend to see the dramatic irony that the villains can't. For a longer, more explicitly wishful treatment of this, see Ada Palmer's wish that Machiavelli could participate in an all-stars philosophical salon. (It occurs to me that this wish, or the wish that Colvin could escape to Burning Man, is like the wish that God had Raptured someone into heaven.)

Leonard pointed out to me that, while we have always applied our values to the people and situations of the past, this trope gives us a conscious way to do it. It also occurs to me: history is, in the popular imagination, set in stone. Comedy depends on surprises. Comedy founded in historical fact can do meta-surprises; a new frontier!