Ben Stiller Donates Stiller & Meara Archive to National Comedy Center as Documentary on His Parents’ Legacy Debuts

Audio By Carbonatix

JAMESTOWN, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 21, 2025--

The National Comedy Center – the United States’ museum and national archive dedicated to the art form of comedy – announced jointly with Ben Stiller that it is now the home to the career archive of legendary comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Donated by Ben Stiller and the Stiller family, the archive spans more than five decades of creative collaboration, documenting the evolution and impact of one of America’s most enduring comedic partnerships.

The archive’s donation to the National Comedy Center coincides with the release of Nothing Is Lost – Ben Stiller’s deeply personal new documentary about his parents’ lives and legacy, which debuts October 24 on Apple TV+. Throughout the film, materials from the archive are featured, offering audiences a rare look at the couple’s creative process and working relationship.

“Knowing my parents’ body of work is preserved at the National Comedy Center means a great deal, because the material they left behind was not just a gift for my family, but for anyone who wants to understand comedy as a creative process,” said Ben Stiller. “They would have been very proud to know that the National Comedy Center is bringing their archive to life in a way that can inspire and educate future generations.”

With sharp, character-driven performances and a conversational approach, Stiller & Meara connected with audiences during the transformational decades of the 1960s and 1970s, rising from New York clubs to a remarkable 36 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show – the era’s most coveted stage – and to countless other television talk and variety programs, including The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Carol Burnett Show.

As a real-life married couple – he Jewish and she raised Irish Catholic – Stiller and Meara drew on the details of their own lives to create sketches that felt relatable and authentic. Their recurring characters, Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle, reflected the friction of worlds colliding – a widely felt experience in post-war America – and, with warmth and intelligence, helped to popularize a more personal and authentic style of comedy that continues to resonate today.

“Stiller & Meara broke ground by mining their own lives for moments rooted in honesty and affection,” stated Journey Gunderson, Executive Director of the National Comedy Center. “Their work was more than funny; it mainstreamed conversations about cultural difference, interfaith dating, gender equity, and the loosening of traditional relationship roles in a way that was quietly revolutionary.”

Beyond their collaborative work, both built acclaimed parallel careers as solo artists – Meara as a writer and in-demand TV actress who racked up four Emmy nominations across three decades as well as a Tony nomination for a late-career renaissance on the Broadway stage, and Stiller as both a seasoned stage performer and a screen actor who embodied unforgettable comedic characters in films like Hairspray and on television series including The King of Queens and his Emmy-nominated role on Seinfeld.

The newly donated archive was meticulously assembled by Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara – its curation a particular passion for Stiller. “From their earliest improv sessions at Chicago’s storied Compass Players, to love letters encapsulating their youthful courtship, to handwritten drafts of sketches like ‘Computer Dating’ and ‘The Last Two People on Earth,’ which made history on Ed Sullivan’s stage, Stiller and Meara’s archive contains tens of thousands of pages spanning a remarkable body of work,” said Dr. Laura LaPlaca, head of the National Comedy Center’s archive. “Their comedy was crafted to feel organic, but they were serial editors – sometimes carrying a single sketch across decades of iteration and refinement.”

Selections from the Stiller & Meara collection will be showcased throughout the museum in Jamestown, NY, which pairs archival materials with cutting-edge technology to tell the story of American comedy’s history, impact and evolution.

The Stiller & Meara archive joins the National Comedy Center’s unprecedented collection of artifacts, documents, and recordings representing comedy’s heritage, including George Carlin’s handwritten joke file, records of Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials and hand-annotated manuscripts, Joan Rivers’ card catalog of nearly 70,000 jokes, and production records from landmark series like I Love Lucy, Saturday Night Live, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, In Living Color, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and more. In 2021, the Center’s archive department was named in honor of comedy legend Carl Reiner, whose own career archive joined the collections.

About the National Comedy Center

The National Comedy Center is the United States’ cultural institution, museum and national archive dedicated to presenting the vital story of comedy and preserving its heritage for future generations. Opened in 2018 in Jamestown, New York, the museum complex offers an unprecedented, immersive visitor experience using state-of-the-art technology, interactivity, and personalization.

USA Today named the National Comedy Center the “Best New Museum in the Country,” TIME magazine named it one of its “World’s Greatest Places,” and U.S. News & World Report selected it as one of the “25 Top Family Weekend Getaways in the U.S.,” while Condé Nast Trav e ler called the National Comedy Center “one of the best museums in the country,” and People magazine named it one of “100 Reasons to Love America.” The museum has been featured in The New York Times, on CBS Saturday Morning, CBS Sunday Morning and on NBC’s TODAY Show, which called it “the Smithsonian of Comedy.”

Based on the vision of Jamestown native Lucille Ball for her hometown to become a destination for comedy, the non-profit National Comedy Center’s mission is to provide education on the comedic arts in the form of commentary and contextualization of its bodies of work across all eras and genres of the art form.

The National Comedy Center operates the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum, which explores the lives, careers, and legacy of the “First Couple of Comedy” and the incredible impact they had on the world, as well as the pioneering role and remarkable influence that I Love Lucy and Desilu Studios had on the entertainment industry for generations to come.

The annual Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, produced and presented by the National Comedy Center, has showcased comedy’s greatest stars and rising comedians over 35 years, including Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Nate Bargatze, Lily Tomlin, John Mulaney, Bill Murray, Taylor Tomlinson, Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, Jeff Foxworthy, Nicole Byer, Jay Leno, Joan Rivers, Margaret Cho, Amy Schumer, Sebastian Maniscalco, W. Kamau Bell, David Spade, Jim Gaffigan, Paula Poundstone, Kevin Nealon, The Smothers Brothers, and more than 300 comedic artists.

The National Comedy Center is a 501(c)(3) non-profit cultural institution whose mission is funded by philanthropic support. Donations and grants support the museum and its work to present the vital story of comedy and preserve its heritage for future generations.

www.ComedyCenter.org
X and Instagram: @ntlcomedycenter
Facebook: National Comedy Center

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251021133892/en/

CONTACT: Press Contact:

Gary Hahn

National Comedy Center

202-285-1356

[email protected]

KEYWORD: NEW YORK UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: FILM & MOTION PICTURES TV AND RADIO GENERAL ENTERTAINMENT CELEBRITY PHILANTHROPY ARTS/MUSEUMS FOUNDATION ENTERTAINMENT

SOURCE: National Comedy Center

Copyright Business Wire 2025.

PUB: 10/21/2025 12:38 PM/DISC: 10/21/2025 12:38 PM

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251021133892/en