Mel Brooks donates vast career archive to National Comedy Center

Mel Brooks is sending the paper trail of a nine-decade career to Jamestown, New York, turning one of comedy’s largest private archives into a national record of how American humor moved from wartime notes to Broadway and blockbuster films. The National Comedy Center announced the gift on May 13, 2026, as Brooks approaches his 100th birthday on June 28.

The archive contains nearly 150,000 production documents and more than 5,000 photographs, with some items dating back more than 80 years to Brooks’ handwritten comedic notes from his service in the U.S. Army during World War II. It also includes material from his work with Sid Caesar on “Your Show of Shows,” the television incubator that helped define postwar sketch comedy, along with records from “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Silent Movie,” “History of the World, Part I” and “Spaceballs.”

Among the collection’s highlights is the original lyric sheet for “Springtime for Hitler,” a piece that captures how Brooks turned provocation into mainstream entertainment. Storyboards, visual development material, behind-the-scenes photographs and production records round out an archive that documents not just one performer’s rise, but the changing boundaries of satire, censorship and popular taste across generations. In an era when comedy often travels instantly and disappears just as fast, Brooks’ papers preserve the drafts, revisions and visual records that show how the jokes were built.

The donation also reunites two intertwined comedy legacies. The National Comedy Center already houses the papers of Carl Reiner, Brooks’ close friend and collaborator, and the two men worked together on “Your Show of Shows” and “The 2000-Year-Old Man,” the routine that helped make Brooks famous in the 1960s. Brooks said he was proud that his work will have a home at comedy’s national archive and continue making people laugh, and he said he was especially pleased because the center mattered to Reiner, who believed in preserving comedy’s history.

Billy Crystal praised Brooks in a statement, calling him “the king,” a reminder of how deeply Brooks has shaped generations of performers. The archive will join holdings from George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Lenny Bruce at the center, which opened in 2018 in Jamestown. With Brooks’ centennial approaching, the donation gives Western New York a centerpiece collection that frames comedy as part of the country’s cultural record, not just its entertainment business.