The National Comedy Center is popular amongst comedians and those who vote in online polls and contests.

Recently, the center was named the #1 Best Pop Culture Museum in the country by USA Today as part of the 2026 USA Today 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards, an online contest. In 2020, it was voted the nation’s #1 “Best New Museum,” and in 2019, it was voted the #2 “Best New Attraction” while ranking as the #1 museum and #1 ticketed attraction in a USA Today poll. The museum has also been named one of Time magazine’s “World’s Greatest Places,” and to U.S. News & World Report’s “25 Top Family Weekend Getaways in the U.S.”

Locals like nothing more than to find fault with things locally. It’s part of the human psyche that the grass is always greener somewhere else. The Comedy Center may never reach the 114,000-person visitor count included in a feasibility study for the center. It’s worth noting, however, that those studies also couldn’t take into account the COVID-19 pandemic that paused the center’s momentum for more than a year or the high inflation that has put a squeeze on many people’s discretionary income over the past few years.

The facts are that the Comedy Center, according to its IRS Form 990 filing in 2024, the center’s gross receipts from admission, merchandise or services has increased from $1,046,244 to $1,210,233 from 2021 through 2024. Gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees, meanwhile, have settled in to be about $2.5 million the past two years. Compare that to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and its $17.2 million in revenue generated in 2024. Compare that to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum – which has been in existence much longer than the National Comedy Center – and its $17.2 million in revenue generated in 2024. The Baseball Hall of Fame has gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees between $4 million and $4.4 million in 2023 and 2024 with paid admission reaching $14.552 million in 2024. The Baseball Hall of Fame’s total assets are $71.5 million compared to $20.4 million for the Comedy Center.

The comparison is interesting. Both museums are located in small cities that have to work hard to market themselves to the outside world. Both boards feature luminaries in their respective fields. The Baseball Hall of Fame has the benefit of an induction weekend that brings tens of thousands of people to Cooperstown. The Comedy Center has the annual Lucille Ball Comedy Festival that brings a few thousand people to Jamestown for a weekend of comedy. There have been, over the past decade, concerns about attendance at the Baseball Hall of Fame and financial losses at the Cooperstown-based facility as recently as 2024. There have always been local concerns about the viability of the National Comedy Center and its sister facility, the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Museum.

In short, in our view there is a path forward for the National Comedy Center to become the Cooperstown of Comedy. The fact the center does well in these national polls and contests is a sign there is support for the concept behind the center. The Baseball Hall of Fame wasn’t always the established entity we see now. It was once financially in the same place as the National Comedy Center. It was once in the early stages of building its collection as the Comedy Center is now. The Comedy Center now is in the type of stage the Baseball Hall of Fame was in during the 1940s.

Winning these contests doesn’t seem like much. But it’s important for the center to keep its national visibility up as it continues to build both its collection and financial viability.