National Comedy Center Launches Norman Lear Exhibit

The National Comedy Center, the United States' official museum and archive dedicated to the art of comedy, will present a special exhibit celebrating Lear's storied legacy in comedy and civic engagement, opening today.

2024 marks the first modern election absent the legendary comedy producer and writer who passed in December 2023 after dedicating his life's work to championing all Americans' right to equal participation in the democratic process—starting with the right to vote.  Lear's contributions are being honored with an installation inside the Comedy Center's galleries in Jamestown, NY, and in an online companion exhibit, both featuring rare archival materials and curated excerpts from Lear's sitcoms.

An original artwork by Shepard Fairey will be featured courtesy of People for The American Way's Artists for Democracy campaign, which was founded by Lear in 1981.

“My husband, Norman would be thrilled to know the National Comedy Center is using humor to shine a light on the importance of voting and defending democracy,” said Lyn Davis Lear.  “From flying combat missions during World War II, to sharing the Declaration of Independence with our country, Norman fought his entire life to ensure all Americans have the freedom to participate in our democratic process.”

The multimedia installation explains how, before political humor was a mainstay of contemporary American entertainment, Norman Lear's body of work proved that political discourse not only had a place in popular culture...but that incisive, intelligent comedy could engage vast, dispersed, and diverse audiences of everyday Americans in impactful conversations about the democratic process and each of our roles within it.  Lear once said “All in the Family was a comedy show, but it dealt with issues that were very real and very much a part of our society. It was my way of starting a conversation.”

Lear's groundbreaking sitcoms, including All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, and Sanford and Son, not only entertained 120 million Americans each week, but put forth a vision for how dinner table debates, neighborhood organizing, and showing up at a local polling place were the accessible—and meaningful—bedrock of American democracy.

“Norman Lear elevated his art to meet the gravity of his sociopolitical moment, advancing an optimistic belief in the power and potential of an engaged citizenry,” said National Comedy Center Executive Director Journey Gunderson.

Lear, an early supporter of the National Comedy Center's mission to establish the first official archive and museum dedicated to preserving comedy's heritage, held beliefs synergetic with the Center's own approach to history work: namely, the idea that artifacts representing our shared past are made most meaningful when they can be accessed by the public and connected to the present.

In 2000, Lear and wife Lyn Davis Lear embodied this when they purchased one of the few surviving copies of the Dunlap Broadside Declaration of Independence to share with the American people in all 50 states through the Declaration of Independence Road Trip. The resulting “Declare Yourself” initiative registered over four million new, young voters in the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections.

On Lear's 99th birthday in 2021 he reflected: “The right to vote is foundational.  It is at the heart of everything I have fought for in war and in peacetime.  Protecting voting rights should not be today's struggle.  But it is.  And that means it is our struggle, yours and mine, for as long as we have breath and strength."

Lear was a six-time Emmy winner, a Kennedy Center Honoree, a recipient of the Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award, and a proud member of the inaugural group of inductees to the Television Academy Hall of Fame.  When President Clinton bestowed the National Medal of Arts on Lear in 1999, he noted: “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”

The exhibit can be experienced in the National Comedy Center's galleries in Jamestown, New York through 2025 and online at ComedyCenter.org/Lear.

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