[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein.

Welcome to "Side By Side."

My guest today has had an impressive journey in her life.

She started out helping tennis legend Billie Jean King to advocate for female athletes.

She now fulfills the vision of another legend, comedian Lucille Ball.

Today we'll meet Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side By Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by... - [Narrator] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley.

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- [Narrator] For 60 years, the Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group.

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- [Narrator] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally.

Thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

[rock music] [bright music] - Journey Gunderson, you have had a very amazing life.

You today run the National Comedy Center.

What got you into that?

- Well, it's a privilege to see through the vision of someone like Lucille Ball, and it really started with her.

- Lucille Ball.

- Mm-hm.

She said to her hometown of Jamestown, "Don't just celebrate me.

Make my hometown a destination for the celebration of comedy and its artists," because she had experienced a career and a lifetime of figuring out that people don't often give comedy and comedians the same level of respect as is afforded other artists and art forms.

I grew up in the region, and then was privileged enough to do the work of the mission of the Women's Sports Foundation founded by Billie Jean King, and was an educational media producer there among other things, and then was hired by the board of directors in Jamestown, New York, that oversaw the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum, and they said, "The time is now to make good on the vision of Lucille Ball and build this destination for educating people on the comedic art form."

- So there was already a museum in their name?

- Just the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum, which was really celebrating the lives and careers of the first couple of comedy.

- I see.

It was only about them.

- [Journey] That's right.

- And now the National Comedy Center, which has been sanctioned by the United States Congress as the official National Comedy Center, what's in it?

Imagine I'm walking through the front door.

What do I see?

- You are greeted with what we call the Welcome Wall, depicting clips and images of all forms of comedy across all genres and eras of its history.

And in fact, the first thing a visitor does is complete a sense of humor profile where you tap what you find funny, and we use that to create a profile that is personal to you and put it on an RFID chip in a wristband.

You wear that throughout your experience and that allows our exhibits to read the room much like any good comedian needs to, so it's very personalized.

- It's for the general public though.

- That's right.

- It's for people who are fascinated by Lucille Ball on the one hand, but interested in comedy on the other hand.

- Right.

We welcome casual comedy consumers, which, almost anyone falls into that category.

I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't love to laugh, but most people have no idea the level of work behind the scenes in making good comedy.

- Yes.

What are the secrets for good comedy?

- Precision, honing.

Any comedian will often tell you that they are not just winging it on stage.

When you see a finished special or listen to an album, it's the result of thousands of hours on stage.

Comedians often say you can't practice this in front of a mirror.

You need an audience to workshop and hone and boil it down to its essence and see what gets the laugh.

Our compass in designing the exhibits was to pull back the curtain on the creative process.

- And teach people how to do that, or at least how to understand that.

How do you decide who you will feature in the museum, in the Comedy Center?

- If the body of work was pioneering in its time, obviously it was widely consumed or was innovative, did something that hadn't been done before, if it made an impact on the art form, we tell its story or preserve its heritage.

Prior to the existence of the National Comedy Center, there was really a void of a national-scale cultural institution that would preserve our rich comedy heritage, so now we are the official archive to preserve the material history.

We have tens of thousands of joke notes from the likes of George Carlin that teach you about the process.

- In their handwriting, for example?

- Mm-hm, yep.

And also the stories, the story of the art form.

- I see.

How do you acquire all that?

- Relationship-building.

So one key domino early on before we opened the museum, and it was still just a vision, was that Kelly Carlin, George Carlin's daughter, was holding on to tens of thousands of scraps of paper, his famous joke files, and he was an archivist of his own career, so it allowed us eventually to create a case study on one of the most prolific comedic minds the world will ever know and tell the story of process.

But so when she decided to donate those archives to our organization, it was, again, kind of the first domino.

- And she would do that because her dad would get recognized in some way in part.

Is that right?

- That's right.

Yes, and kind of sadly, it's incredible how little time it takes for the next generation to forget about or never have an artist from a prior age cohort enter their consciousness.

So I don't mind saying, because I think George Carlin is one of the greatest to ever play the game, that we've also welcomed school groups of high-school-age kids who, when you ask for a show of hands, it's a smattering of hands who really know who he was or why he matters, and that's why we exist.

We believe that these artists have mattered a great deal to our culture and the development of our society and our views, the evolution of the United States and the world, and so they deserve to be appreciated, and without a museum telling that story, they're often forgotten.

- Yeah.

Essentially, you're preserving pieces of history.

Tell us how big the museum is, and I'm fascinated.

Is there another such center in the country?

- No.

- There is no other comedy museum.

There might be a comedy section somewhere, but there's no facility dedicated for comedy preservation, explanation, education, and presentation.

- That's right.

That's right, and believe me, before we broke ground in 2015 and opened in 2018, we did years of preceding feasibility analysis and exploration of whether this was duplicate to anything that existed, and there are great comedy institutions, of course, like the Second City and the Groundlings and UCB, feeder institutions, educational degree programs, but no one was stepping up to play the role of preservation and storytelling in terms of the heritage.

- How did you know how to do what you did?

This is a science in and of itself.

I understand archivists working on historical data and material, but how did you know how it was gonna look like?

You hired obviously experts and architects, or what do you call those people, designers?

- Yes, it was a team that involved some of the best experiential designers, exhibit producers, museum creators, even theme park generators, firms that specialize in those experiences coming together with hundreds of researchers, storytellers and documentarians to get the essence of the story right, people who knew comedy, and then consulting throughout with the artists themselves and making all of these things work together in a symphony that would create a museum experience that, as we said internally, would speak to the skimmers, the swimmers, and the divers.

It was not an easy feat, but I think it's one of the things we've done well.

We're designing for, when we're building these exhibits, the person for whom comedy is a casual enjoyment and they don't know why they should care and maybe never appreciated what goes into making the sauce, but we also designed for the hardcore comedy nerd for whom this is Mecca, and they are coming to take a deep dive into these archives or experiences.

So we designed for two ends of the spectrum and everything in between, and another thing we were very intentional about was authenticity of the story.

So you'll notice there really isn't a third-party institutional voiceover.

The exhibits are full of commentary from hundreds of interviews of the artists themselves.

The comedy community is telling its own story.

- Some artists are dead.

How do you do that?

How did you get Lucille Ball's voice in there?

Interviews?

- Funny you should ask.

Yes, we actually- - You're not using artificial intelligence, are you?

- No, although we do have hologram technology.

- Yes, holograms, yes.

- In fact, Jimmy Fallon agreed to serve as your hologram host of the Johnny Carson exhibit, which is now a beautiful homage to the reign of 30 years of the King of Late Night, Johnny Carson, hosted by the current host of "The Tonight Show," Jimmy Fallon, which is beautiful.

But to your point and question about people who are no longer with us, in fact, Amy Poehler just released a documentary, "Lucy and Desi," that relied upon hours and hours of recordings of Lucy and Desi, and for the same reason I was just talking about authenticity, she let them be the storytellers, and I think that that rings true with people.

- How many comics, humorists, et cetera, are featured in the museum?

- Hundreds.

- Really?

- Yeah, I don't actually have a tally, and it changes by the day, and the depth of the exhibits is hard to describe.

The Comedy Continuum, just as an example, which is probably my favorite experience in the attraction, is a more than 70-foot-wide radar touch-screen interface where you are basically playing six degrees of separation in comedy on steroids.

So hundreds and hundreds of connections lie within, and you are building a web and exploring who has worked with whom in comedy, and also who cites one another as an influence, which is in and of itself kind of tracing the lineage of the art form.

And so you could spend all day just in that experience, so the depth of the content is kind of unmatched.

- So I take it you have lectures, you have conferences, educational seminars, et cetera.

- Yes.

One of our values as an institution is also to encourage people to continue to see live comedy.

Without comedy clubs, which are the gym, to use a sports analogy, without the gym, the Netflix special you're watching would not be nearly as good, would not be as good.

So we produce a comedy festival annually, the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, and bring dozens of artists to town.

We also have produced many National Comedy Center dialogues where we bring in and put on stage the people who have been working behind the scenes to create some of the comedy that is in most Americans' consciousness.

- How many people on staff?

- We have between 70 and 100 full-time staff.

- You're kidding.

Between 70 and 100 full-time staff?

And you're the boss of it all, and that costs a lot of money, Journey.

- And we are a nonprofit.

It's been interesting to see the reaction of people who have spent their entire careers in the entertainment industry, when the light bulb goes off for them, oh, you're like Switzerland.

You have to be objective as the cultural institution to celebrate the art form in a museum form and put the bodies of work and artists into context.

It's only appropriate that we're a nonprofit institution.

No one's getting rich on this, but it is costly to preserve things in perpetuity.

It takes resources and skill sets, and our vice president of archives comes from years of experience with the Library of Congress, for example, and the Paley Center for Media, and so we have the right people working on it and the right conditions for preservation, but good storytellers are also not cheap.

- Yes.

It sounds like you're doing fascinating work, to say the least.

Let's talk some numbers for a minute.

How big is the center, square feet?

- 37,000 square feet of exhibit space, but not counting the archives.

- So archives are in the same building, separate building?

- Separate building.

- And how many visitors last year?

- So we've been open five years, and if you think about our trajectory, we had kind of one barely full season before COVID hit.

And so now having just celebrated our five-year anniversary over the course of the pandemic, we've welcomed half a million visitors.

- Collectively or in one year?

- Collectively.

- Collectively.

That's a lot of people.

How much does it cost me to go in the museum?

- The admission price is $33.50, and we of course have discounts for veterans.

We're a participant in a program that makes it affordable to any family.

So for example, if you are on a form of public assistance, you have a different price, because our goal is to be accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about comedy.

- And typically how long would a person stay in the center?

- Most people think, "Oh, maybe I'll spend an hour or two," and after 4 1/2 hours they say, "Oh, we were supposed to be somewhere else, or maybe we should get a hotel room and come back tomorrow."

That happens a lot.

So the average length of stay is now around four hours, and when people figure out that you can spend days there and not consume everything, they end up buying a membership and deciding to plan a weekend stay or several days.

- Especially if they have an interest in the subject matter, right?

How much did it cost you to build all that?

- It was beyond $50 million.

The capital project proper was about a $50 million project, but if you ask any of the firms who worked on it, they will tell you they gave much more, and so that's a rather efficient number relative to what was created, and most people come in and say, "Are you sure that's all you spent on this?"

- They give in-kind gifting and so on.

Where do you get all that money from?

How did you raise all that money?

- Lots of grant-writing and- - Oh, so you got it from foundations, government?

- A mix of all of the above.

There were more than 19 different funding sources.

- [Nido] Mostly local sources?

- Local and national.

Regional foundations, but also there was a buy-in of federal support.

There was state funding available, but the largest grant we received was $5 million.

So it was a lot of convincing people that comedy deserves this and that there's value to this mission and vision, and we have a lot of private donors.

In fact, we just cut the ribbon on the naming of the George and Jolene Brand-Schlatter Theater, and George Schlatter, of course, created the show "Laugh-In" and the American Comedy Awards and gave the start to people like Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn and so many others, and there's a lot of synergy in what he dedicated his life to and what the museum is doing.

- And what is your ultimate goal?

How do you sustain this museum for the next 10, 20 years?

Do you have an endowment?

If so, do people, are apt to gift endowments, or is this more funding from foundations?

- I am actively raising the endowment, and we just secured our first National Endowment for the Humanities grant, so we just received $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, who has understood the value of this work and that there was a void of it being done before, and so that's my job now, is to make sure it's sustainable so that we can keep telling... We are not done telling the stories of comedy, and we'll never be able to sit back and say that the work is done, so it's about now sustaining this work.

- You went to Ithaca College.

You majored in communication and sports information.

How did you learn to run a National Comedy Center?

- Who says I know how?

[laughs] - [laughs] You have great people around you.

- That's right.

- You've attracted good people.

- That's right.

I think that hiring smart, passionate people is the best way to run anything, and I'm sure I'm not telling you anything, and I've been very fortunate to...

The longer we've been at this, the more we've been able to attract people who care about the mission, and it's a really hardworking team, so if the passion isn't there, it doesn't work out, and luckily there are a lot of people who are passionate about comedy and understand the value in our lives.

You asked how did I learn maybe how to do this.

In working for the Women's Sports Foundation, it was kind of similar.

It was a non-profit that, we spent time making the case for the value of sports and physical activity in girls' lives, that it will improve their lives, and it's an intangible.

It's a non-profit that isn't curing cancer necessarily.

It's not the American Red Cross.

So I think that experience of making the case for something that has value in enriching our lives served me well in making the case for comedy.

- Yeah, it makes sense.

Its fundamentals are the same, right?

Organization, communication, fundraising, developing your team, et cetera, et cetera.

What is the long-term view?

I guess when I think about things like this, I think, how do you keep it alive, interesting, fascinating?

How often do you have to change exhibits, or do you?

I suspect you can keep doing seminars and conferences and bringing people, but how do you make the actual viewership of what you have intriguing for people who wanna come back again and again and again?

- Well, the good news is the subject matter in and of itself I find incredibly interesting, and so as long as we are paying attention to what's actually happening in comedy, I can't...

It's almost hard to choose which stories to tell.

There's so much going on.

As a museum, we stay respectfully one step behind the art form, because sometimes it's only with the benefit of hindsight that you can decide whether it's a story worth telling.

So let's take the pandemic for example.

A lot of people learned the hard way that it's a two-way energy street, the performance of comedy.

Too easily a layperson would say, "Well, can't we just do comedy on Zoom?"

Well, without that feedback from the audience, the comedian isn't getting what they need to out of it.

They can't workshop new material.

We saw comedians performing at drive-ins where they couldn't hear laughter, but maybe cars were flickering their lights.

That in and of itself is an exhibit waiting to happen, and I think we learned a lot about the different form the art can take.

One of our exhibits, for example, that we opened with in 2018 is making a meme.

Memes are a genuinely new format and form of comedy that didn't exist before.

So as long as we're paying attention, there's no shortage of interesting stories to tell, and when the subject matter makes people laugh, I don't think anyone...

I've never seen anyone walk out of the museum having had a bad time.

- It is in Jamestown, New York, because Lucille Ball was born there?

- That's right.

- She was born in Jamestown, New York.

- Yes.

- That's why it's there.

- That's right.

- And is it accessible to a lot of people to be there?

- Yes.

- I think of Jamestown, New York, as being up north, far away from most of America.

You don't get people from Texas and Oklahoma, do you?

- We had visitors from all 50 states within three months of opening, and the comedy festival weekend, four or five days that we were just coming off of in early August, has ticket buyer zip codes from more than 40 states in a matter of four days.

So people will travel for good cultural products, and this is cultural tourism.

And now that it has become the home of the archives of the greatest to ever play the game, it's the only place you can have this experience, so people will travel for it.

In terms of our geography, we went into this well aware that we aren't LA, Chicago or New York, great comedy cities, but Jamestown has a proximity to drive-market population that fits well with destination consumption of these kind of products like museums.

So we're within a day's drive of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Buffalo, New York, Boston, Chicago.

We're within a day's drive of 2/3 of the Canadian population.

So it's not that Jamestown has to be a large metro area.

It just has to have the proximity.

- I see.

Good roads, good flights, et cetera.

You were an athlete.

What did you play?

- Basketball was my main focus for much of my youth, and then- - In high school, in Ithaca, where?

- In high school, and then I was recruited to the basketball team at Ithaca and decided I wanted to play volleyball instead, and was cut from the volleyball team when I thought I could just switch.

So I took a year and worked pretty hard to get onto that roster, and then ended up playing a great career of college volleyball.

And I played softball, I swim, I like to play tennis, and that naturally led to being passionate about that for other girls and women because, and I'm sure you've seen this in leaders in your own organization, the benefits to be gained from playing sports, for anyone, boys or girls, but I think particularly girls, include confidence, positive body image.

There's research the Women's Sports Foundation did, for example, that said that girls who play sports are less likely to stay in an abusive relationship.

So translate all of that into the rest of your life, and these things build confidence and serve people well.

- Good social skills, good development of teamwork.

- Learning to fail, learning to lose and come back.

- Learning to fail, succeed, being gracious in the process, all of that.

I find this a very, very intriguing topic because I've done some homework on the National Comedy Center and I'm gonna come and visit you, but I don't know that I would wanna pay $33.

Could I get a discount?

- For you, Nido?

Sure.

[laughs] - A complimentary ticket to get in?

- I think so.

If you're there to do research, which, we do welcome a lot of academics and researchers and documentarians, then by appointment you could even see the archives.

- Okay, it's a deal.

- Which would be a special VIP experience.

- Journey, thank you for being with me on "Side By Side," and I wish you the very best.

- Thank you.

[bright music] [bright music] - [Announcer] Funding for "Side By Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by... - [Narrator] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley.

This is home.

- [Narrator] For 60 years, the Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group.

Great people, smart service.

- [Narrator] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally.

Thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

[rock music]