A review of HBO’s ‘Assume the Position With Mr. Wuhl’. It begins:
He confesses to having studied “nothing” while an undergraduate at the University of Houston. But last year, the comedian and actor Robert Wuhl decided that he wanted to become a college professor. Not a real one, but a humorous substitute, backed by an HBO crew, who would amuse a packed lecture hall with a curriculum proposing that American history was popular culture — and a lot of gossip.
“The key to history is who tells the story,” Mr. Wuhl said in an interview. “Tolstoy said, ‘History is a wonderful thing, if only it were true.’ If O’Reilly and Franken see the same event, you’ll get two different stories. A guy writes a book that says Lincoln is gay, so is he gay because someone says so?”
In “Assume the Position With Mr. Wuhl” (tonight at 10 on HBO), he asks a hall full of university students to consider the piffle perpetrated by Washington Irving in the early 19th century: that Christopher Columbus had discovered that the earth was round.
Or the nonsense that Paul Revere, and not the little-known postal rider Israel Bissell, deserved Longfellow’s lionization for warning about British troop movements. But, he says, Bissell, who galloped much farther than Revere, did not suit the poet’s stirring legend-making. He rights the wrong with a quick ditty about Bissell.
Take Mr. Wuhl’s quiz.