Year One
Directed by Harold Ramis

Anachronism is funny. There is always a moment, watching a deadly serious movie in which Moses or Jesus or Marcus Aurelius speaks present-day English, when it either comes perilously close to invoking a gigglefest or hurls you into one by the unfortunate use of some locution that is five years rather than thousands of years old.

This is why the most brilliant moviemaking stroke of the past decade was Mel Gibson's use of Aramaic as the lingua franca of The Passion of the Christ, thereby avoiding any potential guffaws in the midst of the crucifixion and earning $700 million worldwide. Deliberate anachronism is funny, too. In Love and Death, Woody Allen's 19th-century Russian aristocrat is told by someone with a thick Russian accent that a woman he knows "is taking lovers." Woody doesn't understand: "She's taking uppers?"

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a revolutionary peasant, told that Arthur became king because the Lady of the Lake presented him with Excalibur, scoffs: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. .  .  . You can't expect to wield executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

And then there is the gold standard in deliberate anachronism: the 90 minutes or so of sheer bliss during which Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, over the course of 14 years, recorded the series of comedy routines in which an interviewer asks questions of a 2,000-year-old man. The joke is that the 2,000-year-old

"How did you feel when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake?" he is asked after he says he dated her. His answer: "Terrible." The greatest historical invention? Saran Wrap. The first national anthem? "Let 'em all go to Hell except Cave 76!" The missing Shakespeare play? Queen Alexandra and Murray, which closed in Egypt.

The 2,000-Year-Old Man has just been mashed up with the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures and remade as the new comedy Year One, in which the pudgy scenery-chewer Jack Black buddies up with Michael Cera, the gangly boy-man costar of Juno who possesses a miraculous sense of comic timing and an entirely original way with a line of dialogue. The movie begins with the two of them living in prehistory with a small tribe in which they are also-rans because they are bad hunters and not especially good gatherers ("and those are the only two jobs we have here").

They leave their village and meet up with Cain just as he is killing Abel; end up meeting Abraham just as he is binding Isaac; run away from Abraham because he announces his plan to circumcise them ("it's a sleek new look, everyone's going to be doing it"); and find themselves in Sodom, where they are pursued by a randy High Priest as they attempt to rescue two girls from their home village who are about to be sacrificed to the gods.