Entertainment

Memorabilia Out Of The Comedy Closet

November 14, 2000 / 1:27 PM EST / AP

When workers cracked open the door of a forgotten closet in midtown Manhattan, they uncovered a treasure trove of comedy more than 40 years old.

"It's as exciting as an Egyptian tomb that's been opened," comedian Carl Reiner told The New York Times. "Did they find any dead writers there?"

Not exactly.

But the City Center staff did find box upon box of scripts and other memorabilia from Your Show of Shows, The Admiral Broadway Revue and a number of other pioneering television shows, the Times reported Tuesday.

The papers are those of Max Liebman, a comedy producer from TV's golden age who died in 1981.

The closet sits just a few feet away from a famed location in New York entertainment history known as the writers' room, where legendary figures such as Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Neil Simon brainstormed classic comic sketches in the early 1950s.

The pinnacle of the collection is 137 scripts - complete with scribblings in the margins - for Your Show of Shows, a 90-minute program starring Caesar, Coca and Reiner that ran from Feb. 25, 1950, until June 5, 1954. It served as the precursor to such ensemble comedy hits as Saturday Night Live.

Also found in the closet were many scripts from the show's forerunner, The Admiral Broadway Revue, which starred Caesar and Coca and ran from January to June 1949.

The closet also held 17 scripts for "Stanley," a 1956 situation comedy starring Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett.

Even one of Liebman's toupees, the butt of innumerable jokes, turned up. Reiner later turned the balding producer with toupee into a running gag on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was inspired by the writers' room. The 1982 movie My Favorite Year and Simon's 1993 play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, also were based on the writers' experiences.

The papers will be added to the Library of Congress, where they will be available to researchers.

Ronald C. Simon, the television curator at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, said that the discovery will allow scholars to examine how such groundbreaking shows were put together.

Caesar, now 78, said he doesn't remember the closet, but "I'm sure it's very important."