Carl Reiner ... and Drive to Lucy Home & Grave

(1 video) of the "special bench" I sat down on

We were lucky and privileged to be at the National Comedy Museum just one week after they acquired the Carl Reiner Archives and opened an exhibit for the public called “Carl Reiner: Keep Laughing”. The Carl Reiner Department of Archives & Preservation was opened for the study of comedy history, and a resource for educating artists, students, scholars and the public to learn about comedy’s great minds and unique voices.

Carl Reiner, who passed away in June of 2020, was a twelve-time Emmy award-winner, a Grammy award-winner, and a recipient of The Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The Reiner family donated rare creative papers, scripts and artifacts covering Carls 70-year career in comedy as a writer, director, producer, author and performer. The exhibit shows hundreds of never-before-seen materials audiovisual clips, creative papers, unpublished materials, rare photographs, film footage, audio recordings and thousands of pages of creative papers. He was most proud of creating and producing ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show” which he drafted the pilot script in 1959 and it still remains a significant work for comedy history and for the history of American culture. The museum has the scripts for all 158 episodes, totaling more than 7,500 pages, feature detailed edits and additions made in real-time during the writing, read-throughs and rehearsals for each episode and now provides extraordinary access for people to see and begin to understand the script development and creative process for the 15-time Emmy-winning situation comedy.

The “Carl Reiner: Keep Laughing” exhibit allowed us to explore interactive kiosks featuring work with Steve Martin, Sid Caesar’s "Your Show of Shows", the great The Dick Van Dyke Show materials, and Reiner with Mel Brooks talking to the "2000 Year Old Man" in many situations.

We went back on this morning before hitting the road in order to see this special exhibit and it did not disappoint, so much fun and so many laughs. We finished the museum (although at least another day could have been spent here) with the karaoke bar, Cheers, Will Ferrel, and a peek into the basement of the museum where there were “blue” exhibits of the history of indecency in comedy. It includes uncensored, adult-themed, and controversial comedy. It is an adults-only, with explicit, mature, and profane content. The Uncensored Content explores the history of taboo, freedom of speech, censorship, and George Carlin’s famous "seven dirty words". Famous Artifacts include items like Lenny Bruce's trench coat and legal/arrest archives from comedians who pushed boundaries,

In the last room, we looked in the databases of award winning comedians and what they won for (often surprising what was missing and included) and then received an online summary of what we had seen, our focus and likes on the visit here. Oh yes, I did sit on the fart couch.

We also got to visit the Lucy’s Birth Home and the over-the-top amount of Lucy nostalgia STUFF being sold there!!!! WOW! Lastly, before leaving town, we went to the Lakeview Cemetery where she rests. It is the final resting place of many of Lucy’s ancestors and immediate family members. Lucy is buried in the Ball/Hunt family plot along with her parents, grandparents, and brother.Read more