Drunk History will teach us about Louis Armstrong, pirates and bananas

The third season of “Drunk History” debuts Tuesday at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.

The episode draws a bead on the “Bone Wars”, the intense rivalry between two 19th century paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh (Christopher Meloni) and Edward Drinker Cope (Tony Hale), sparked by a battle over fossils in the South Jersey marl pit from which the first significantly intact dinosaur skeleton was ever unearthed. Is there anything more passionate than community theater? Each episode features three stories told by inebriated narrators and reenacted by performers. Just trying as hard as you can to do the best performance with what you’ve been given, and I feel like that’s what I like to do with our show.

Waters uses comedians and comedy writers as his narrators, “not for the obvious reason of their being amusing but because they understand a beginning, middle and end to a story”. “Natasha, I believe in a one-piece, cheetah-style swimsuit, telling the Patty Hearst story in a bathtub sounds amusing, but when you saw it, it didn’t look funny-you just felt bad for her. And I don’t want anyone to feel bad for her”.

This season’s narrators include Paget Brewster, Cameron Esposito, Fortune Feimster, Rich Fulcher, Mark Gagliardi, Matt Gourley, Dan Harmon, Kyle Kinane, Jen Kirkman, Lauren Lapkus, Paul F. Tompkins, Duncan Trussell, David Wain, Brendon Walsh and Jeremy Konner. “It’s hard to really articulate what it is about her except that she always cares about what she’s talking about and no matter what, she’s going to tell you the story and that’s kind of the ultimate goal for everyone; to tell the story and put their take on it to”.

Waters is also the person the narrator narrates to, and, though he is usually a few drinks behind the speaker, he follows them dutifully into inebriation.

Josh Hartnett as Clark Gable for the upcoming “Miami” episode of “Drunk History“.

Waters stays out of the way at this point, he said, because “I want it to be real, when they talk to me it’s the first time I’m hearing it from them”. He was a great one to drink with. “I guess the biggest transition is just that now more people know about it. It makes me proud doing something that more people can see and that they like it”, Waters said. “And it just so happens that comedy comes out of the way we’re trying to tell the history”. “Why’d you leave that part out?”