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Mel Brooks and the National Comedy Center, the United States’ museum and national archive dedicated to the art form of comedy, announced today that the Center will become the home of Brooks’ career archives – one of the most comprehensive collections of comedic creative material ever preserved, encompassing works that sit at the core of America’s cultural identity.
The archive comprises nearly 150,000 creative and production documents and over 5,000 photographs, many never-before-seen. It offers an unparalleled record of Brooks’ creative life and the development of works that transformed American comedy and culture – including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Producers, Silent Movie, History of the World, Part I, and Spaceballs, along with extensive materials from every feature film Brooks directed across his multifaceted career as a writer, performer, filmmaker and producer.
Spanning more than six decades, the archive begins with Brooks’ earliest handwritten comedic notes created during his service in the U.S. Army during World War II. It then moves through rare materials from his years writing for the legendary Sid Caesar on television series like Your Show of Shows, offering a vivid look into the formative creative environment that helped shape his voice. These early pages reveal the foundations of Brooks’ instinct for structure, rhythm and irreverence – instincts that would later define his revolutionary approach to satire and parody.
“I’ve always been proud to say that I make people laugh for a living. So, knowing that my work will have a home at comedy’s national archive and continue making people laugh leaves me with a deep sense of pride,” said Mel Brooks. “I’m honored that my contributions will be preserved for future generations at the National Comedy Center – especially because it’s a place that was meaningful to my best friend Carl Reiner, who believed in the importance of preserving comedy’s history. I know he’d be happy that our work will be around for the next 2000 years, or maybe even more.”
As the collection progresses into Brooks’ film career, it presents a remarkable chronicle of his artistic evolution. Drafts, revisions, production documents, notes and visual materials capture the development of comedic ideas from concept to screen, illustrating how Brooks refined sequences, characters and jokes through collaboration, instinct and fearless experimentation. The breadth and depth of the material underscore the extraordinary impact of his body of work and his influence across multiple generations of comedic storytellers.
“Mel Brooks’ archive represents an unparalleled primary-source record of how a singular artist reshaped narrative, satire and cinematic form – all through the lens of comedy,” said Journey Gunderson, Executive Director of the National Comedy Center. “Preserving this material is not simply an act of stewardship – it is the safeguarding of a vital cultural legacy that will inform scholarship, creative inquiry and historical understanding for generations.”
Among the collection’s most exceptional elements are rare and historically significant items from Brooks’ classic films, including his World War II–era comedy notebook; the original handwritten lyrics to the song “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers; extensive storyboards and visual development materials from Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and other films; and a remarkable assembly of never-before- or rarely-seen behind-the-scenes photographs capturing Brooks directing, rehearsing and collaborating throughout his career.
Dr. Laura LaPlaca, head of the National Comedy Center’s archive, added: “We preserve comedy’s history to document how our society debates, resists, copes, and expresses its truths. It is challenging to imagine the American twentieth century without the vital voice of Mel Brooks – his work helped us understand one another and endure. Preserving this material ensures that Brooks’ creative legacy will be studied, contextualized, and appreciated at a level equal to its impact.”
The National Comedy Center’s Carl Reiner Department of Archives & Preservation was named in honor of founding advisory board member Carl Reiner, whose own comprehensive career archives were added to the Center’s permanent collection in 2021. The Archive is also home to George Carlin’s extensive handwritten creative notes, Joan Rivers’ legendary 70,000-joke card catalog, Lenny Bruce’s annotated manuscripts and obscenity trial papers, production records from Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s trailblazing Desilu Studios, and original creative materials from series such as Saturday Night Live, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, In Living Color, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, among many others.
The material from the Mel Brooks collection will be catalogued and curated before ultimately being displayed within the innovative and interactive National Comedy Center exhibits in Lucille Ball’s hometown of Jamestown, NY – a non-profit museum experience recognized by TIME magazine as one of its “World’s Greatest Places,” selected by USA Today as the nation’s “Best Pop Culture Museum” and “Best New Museum,” and called “incredibly thoughtful” and “amazing” by recent Comedy Center performance headliners Jon Stewart and Nate Bargatze, respectively.