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 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.

Director Ben Stiller attends the premiere for “Stiller & Meara” at Alice Tully Hall during the 63rd New York Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025, in New York. AP photo

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.”

Undated photo of Anne Meara And Jerry Stiller

Selections from the Stiller & Meara collection will be showcased throughout the museum in Jamestown, which pairs archival materials with 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.

Handwritten joke notes from Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara are pictured. The notes are part of the Stiller-Meara archives that will be housed at the National Comedy Center.

A Seinfeld script hand-annotated by Jerry Stiller is pictured.

Spiral notebooks of creative material from the Stiller & Meara Archive are pictured.