It took eight years for the National Comedy Center in Jamestown to travel a bumpy road from idea to reality. Even when it was just a few days from opening, Executive Director Journey Gunderson still wasn’t sure of its prospects for success.
“I have always had a level of skepticism about our ability to pull this off,” she told The Buffalo News in 2018, in an article that used the word “pipe dream” in the headline.
Five years into its existence, based on what it has managed to accumulate, it’s safe to say it’s a pipe dream no more.
• In June, the center announced it would become the home of Joan Rivers’ career archive including a file cabinet containing more than 65,000 original jokes, from the earliest days of her career in the 1950s through her death in 2014.
• The same month, the center cut the ribbon on an exhibit celebrating New York City comedy club Carolines on Broadway. The Times Square venue played host to a who’s who of comedy legends, including Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes, Billy Crystal, Amy Schumer, Tracy Morgan, Norm Macdonald and Kevin Hart. Carolines closed at the end of 2022.
• In 2022, the center became the home archive from the groundbreaking 1990s sketch comedy series “In Living Color.” The collection includes scripts, creative materials and artifacts that show the development of the series – including censorship battles with then-fledgling Fox network.
• Those developments followed the acquisition of the archives of other giants in comedy, including George Carlin – whose family contributed his material two years before the center officially opened – and Carl Reiner, whose artifacts and documents include Reiner’s typewriter case and original, typed manuscript for the first episode of “Head of the Family” – which would become the “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
The center, which Gunderson hoped would become a kind of comedy hall of fame that could play off of its…
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