If you like history but don’t care what actually happened, check out Fin vs History. The podcast features two British comedians, Fin Taylor and Horatio Gould, poking fun at some of history’s most revered figures and events.
The humor in the pod is frequently juvenile and occasionally exhausting, but chaos is part of the appeal. For instance, an episode about Mahatma Gandhi punctures the bubble surrounding the saintlike icon, treating him as a flawed human being, “the biggest killjoy there’s ever been,” rather than the sacred figure from our history lessons. Much of the humor is deliberately adolescent, with extended riffs about Gandhi’s sexual anxieties and “self-control” repeatedly derailing the historical narrative.
Taylor is sometimes labeled “right-coded” for his contrarian and politically incorrect jokes. But he’s far more interesting than the classic woke-baiters of culture-war comedy. “The truth is that I don’t really believe in anything beyond getting the next laugh,” Taylor once told The Guardian. His attitude channels Oscar Wilde’s “art for art’s sake” creed, rejecting the need for entertainment to serve a political purpose.
