Mel Brooks archives coming to National Comedy Center

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.”