Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara archives donated to the National Comedy Center
The career archives of legendary comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara has been donated to the National Comedy Center.
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. The documentary debuts October 24 on Apple TV+.
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.
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 contains tens of thousands of page and was meticulously assembled by Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. It includes items 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.
Selections from the Stiller & Meara collection will be showcased throughout the museum.
For additional information, visit comedycenter.org
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