Mel Brooks has spent a lifetime making people laugh, and now a huge piece of that work is headed to a museum.
The National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, announced last week that the 99-year-old filmmaker and comedian has donated a major collection of previously unseen documents and photographs to the museum.
The donation includes about 150,000 production documents and 5,000 photographs spanning Brooks’ decades-long career as a writer, performer, director and producer.
Brooks is one of the few entertainers to achieve EGOT status, with an Academy Award for screenwriting, four Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and three Tony Awards.
“I’ve always been proud to say that I make people laugh for a living,” Brooks said in the press release. “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.”
The archive includes material from some of Brooks’ best-known films, including “The Producers” from 1967, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” from 1974, “Silent Movie” from 1976 and “Spaceballs” from 1987.
Items include storyboards, visual development materials and extensive production records from every feature film Brooks directed, along with photographs documenting him at work throughout his directing career.
Some material dates back more than 80 years, including some of Brooks’ earliest comedic writing, among them notes drafted while he was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II.
The collection also includes material from Brooks’ screenwriting work with Sid Caesar on “Your Show of Shows,” the live variety program that ran for four seasons in the 1950s and earned two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Among the highlights is the original lyric sheet for “Springtime for Hitler” from “The Producers.”
“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 deeply in preserving comedy’s history,” Brooks said. “I know he’d be happy that our work will be around for the next 2,000 years, or maybe even more.”
Brooks’ comment referred to his recurring “2000 Year Old Man” comedy routine with Reiner, who died in 2020 at age 98.
Journey Gunderson, executive director of the National Comedy Center, called the Mel Brooks archive essential to the history of comedy.
“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,” she said.
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