The Cooperstown of Comedy

"Welcome to the Comedy Center!"

The young man selling tickets is borderline manic, seriously into his job and hoping some of the hipness to which it puts him in proximity will rub off—an understandable wish, as Jamestown, NY, is not an obviously happening place. In what passed for its heyday, the best slogan it could produce was "Furniture Capital of the World"—a title disputed by the other furniture capital of the world, High Point, North Carolina. Jamestown still has a video store—possibly two, as Mr. Mark's Adult Store, co‑located with Luke's Bait and Tackle ("Worms and Minnows and More"), looks open for business.

Could a museum of comedy be a good idea? Even if the very concept of joke had not suddenly become "problematic"? The excerpts from Bob Hope's joke archive put on display by the Folger Shakespeare Library can only be called sobering.

The National Comedy Center landed in Jamestown because Lucille Ball was born there and raised by her grandparents in the adjacent village of Celoron. The Lucy Desi Center for Comedy is three blocks away, as is the Lucille Ball Little Theatre. Celeron, not to be left out, devotes a prime chunk of its Chautauqua Lake shoreline to the Lucille Ball Memorial Park (a site that TripAdvisor rated #1 of the two Things to Do in Celoron).

What exactly to expect from a Comedy Center? Laughs, natch. Also nostalgia—but whose? The answer, as to so many other questions, is "Baby Boomers." Also flattery, reassurance that a jury with 12 of you would never have convicted Lenny Bruce. For Baby Boomers, Lenny—like the Civil Rights movement—is a moral free ride, the real action having happened before they left high school.

The comedy in question is mostly what you think of when you think comedian: stand‑up, sketches, sitcom. Movies, radio, cartoons, and comic strips get some attention, prose not so much: a nod to Mark Twain; no Thurber or S.J. Perlman or Dave Barry (who has devoted his career to rescuing the word "humorist" from the death grip of Andy Rooney); no Kaufman & Hart. Tributes to Neil Simon there surely must be but, if there were, I missed them. This is a national comedy center, and stand-up comedians are how, comedically speaking, Americans roll.

The ticket is a wristband with a chip on which to compile your "comedy profile" by choosing favorites from a menu of comedians, TV shows, and movies. When visiting the mock‑up comedy club, the mock‑up TV room with couches and end tables, or the tiny mock movie theater, what you see will be determined by the profiles of whoever is present. Steer clear of the Bob Hope demographic.

Exhibits serve up not only videos of short performances but also mini-documentaries that would in creative writing workshops be called craft talks. In one, stand-up comedians discuss hecklers: "Against us," says a smiling comic, "they don't have a chance." Another explains the role of sitcom sidekicks—Ed Norton, Barney Fife, Cosmo Kramer. Sidekicks are disrupters, audience favorites who get a hand just for making an entrance. Frasier Crane had to function differently when the character went from being a sidekick in "Cheers" to being the star of "Frasier" and getting a sidekick of his own.

Interactivity is big. You can add Foley to a film, do a few minutes of stand-up, insert yourself into a classic comedy routine like "Who's on First?" On request, videos of the results will be emailed. Interaction is sometimes just a tarted‑up sway of choosing from a menu, as when small-scale replicas of classic comic props—banana peel, cream pie, anvil—serve as controllers for selecting video clips showing the props in action.

The memorabilia displays are heaping buffets of Boomer comfort food: Seinfeld's puffy shirt, the Coneheads' motorcycle helmets, a jumpsuit from Ghostbusters, an Alan Brady toupee.

No space is wasted; the pedestrian bridge joining the Center's two wings is a hall of one‑liners, some stenciled on the windows and others zinging you from speakers overhead.

In a basement guarded by content warnings lies the Blue Room. "Blue material," we're told, gets its name from the blue envelopes in which managers of vaudeville theaters sent notes flagging risqué lines that would have to be cut, since vaudeville sold itself as a cleaned‑up version of burlesque. (Other etymologies have been proposed.)

The Blue Room serves up plenty of dirty and otherwise offensive jokes—nearly all of which are very, very funny. Its patron saint is Lenny Bruce. The holy relics on display include his typewriter, the trench coat in which he was famously photographed on the way from stage to jail, and the posthumous pardon for his 1964 obscenity conviction, issued 39 years later by Governor George Pataki.

Bruce died from a drug overdose while his conviction was under appeal. In video interviews, contemporary comedians reverently cite his influence: helping transform stand‑up from a rattled‑off stream of gags to a more personal form of story‑telling, expanding the boundaries of what comedians could talk about and how they could say it. The latter is, of course, a mixed blessing: on the upside, Richard Pryor and George Carlin; on the downside, boring paint-by-number "edginess" and, if we're being honest, the tiresome self‑importance into which Bruce and Carlin could lapse.

The hagiography crediting Bruce with sea changes in First Amendment law may be mistaken. A Harvard prof has published an article in the Michigan Law Review to show that Lenny's legal battles had little effect on the law, which was rapidly liberalizing for other reasons. His prosecutions occurred mainly because he tried so hard to provoke them. Had he not treated them as a form of theater, often by representing himself, the outcomes would likely have been better—although, as the article notes, "dying and being censored are both good career moves."

The Comedy Center opened in 2018. The only other 21st century event to put Jamestown/Celoron in the national news was the furor over a bronze statue of Lucille Ball unveiled in 2009 and locally reviled as "Scary Lucy." An online campaign complaining that the statue looked more like Steve Buscemi, or maybe Stalin, went viral and threatened to make Lucille Ball Memorial Park an attraction primarily for tourists of irony. Some critics tried to be polite. "I don't like that statue," one local woman told the Buffalo News, "but that person worked hard on that statue. He worked very hard. And I'm sorry that it didn't turn out a little bit better than it did." Some made death threats. "I do one piece," the sculptor told the paper, "admittedly it was not one of my best works, and it just keeps coming up and coming up and coming up." He gave up casting in bronze and donated his tools to an educational institution. Happily, this career change "freed him up to spend more time with his wife and 7-year-old son." In 2016 Scary Lucy was moved to a less picturesque location (beside the parking lot) and a new statue, soon known as "Lovely Lucy," took its place.

The Lucy Desi Center for Comedy, established in 1996, has become a pair of museums with a single ticket: Desilu Studios, devoted to commemorating "I Love Lucy"; the Lucy and Desi Museum, chronicling the lives of its stars.

Desilu Studios begins with a video in which a long‑time editor of "I Love Lucy" describes its technical innovations, which created the modern sitcom: recorded and distributed on film (not blurry kinescopes), using three cameras (choreographed to avoid stopping for set-ups), before a live audience (no fake laugh track). The manuscript of the original pitch to the network makes it clear the production team knew exactly what they were doing. Lucy Ricardo and her band‑leader husband Desi would be a loving couple with only one, albeit recurring, bone of contention: she wanted to be in show business and he wanted to prevent that. That was the mainspring of many famous episodes, such as Lucy stomping grapes to prepare for a bit part in an Italian movie, or Lucy getting steadily more tipsy as she tries to film a commercial for 46 proof Vitameatavegamin health tonic. You can film yourself doing that commercial on a replica of the set.

The show's popularity was astonishing. Fans bought I Love Lucy Bedroom Suites ($198), one of which is on display. Lucy's real-life pregnancy was scripted into the show, a TV first. "Lucy Goes to the Hospital," a prerecorded episode aired the day after she gave birth by C‑section, was watched in 72 percent of the TV-owning households—possibly the highest audience rating ever. The popularity of the old episodes rebroadcast while she recovered was a revelation: re‑runs, to which Ricky had cannily secured the rights, could be a goldmine.

The Ricardos' living room in New York and the hotel suite used in their LA episodes have been reconstructed in detail, though the sight of them in color, with three dimensions, seems somehow inauthentic. Display cases full of wild props and costumes recall how zestfully Lucy threw herself into ridiculous situations. If reminders are needed, here are loglines for a few episodes:

On the flight home from Europe, Lucy disguises a 30-pound hunk of cheese as a baby in order to avoid an extra baggage charge.

Lucy accidentally destroys a statue and must impersonate it for the unveiling ceremony.

Lucy sets her nose on fire while trying to disguise herself from William Holden.

It is often said Americans have created two art forms: jazz and the book musical. Stand‑up comedy, although it has antecedents, may qualify as another. It wasn't Lucille Ball's medium, but when approached in the 1980s about establishing a museum for her work, she advocated one for comedy of all kinds. That was the shrewd businesswoman speaking. Not quite 30 years after her death, she got what she wanted, and it's fun.