Mel Brooks Donates Career Archive to National Comedy Center

The National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, announced last week that Mel Brooks has donated a major collection of previously unseen documents and photographs. The donation includes approximately 150,000 production documents and 5,000 photographs spanning Brooks’ decadeslong career as a writer, performer, director and producer.

The archive features material from many of Brooks’ most iconic films, including “The Producers” (1967), “Blazing Saddles” (1974), “Young Frankenstein” (1974), “Silent Movie” (1976) and “Spaceballs” (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 in the collection dates back more than 80 years, including some of Brooks’ earliest comedic writings.

The collection also features 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.

“I’ve always been proud to say that I make people laugh for a living,” Brooks said in the press release. ” “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.

Journey Gunderson, the 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.