Thousands of gags on file cards

The famed archive of jokes that American comedian Milton Berle collected over his lifetime is to be auctioned in Los Angeles next month.

Thousands of typewritten gags on index cards are expected to fetch up to £10,000 when they go under the hammer at Bonhams auction house on May 5.

By the time of his death in 2002 at the age of 93, Berle is said to have accumulated more than six million jokes, a collection once described as ‘the most comprehensive storehouse of 20th-century humour in the world’.

Next month’s lot comprises two large upright catalogue files and two small filing cabinets each containing thousands of jokes, indexed by subject. There are also six boxes of loose jokes and cue cards.

Other memorabilia for sale includes Berle's archive of working scripts from his entire career, spanning vaudeville, radio, television, and film, which has an estimated value of £65,000.

Catherine Williamson, Bonhams' director of entertainment memorabilia said: 'This is certainly the bulk of Berle's literary estate: his working copies, plus revised final bound copies of nearly all of his performances. Much of this material was housed in his office over the years, including the file cabinets with the joke cards.'

As well as a candid autobiography, in which he revealed the existence of a lovechild he had fathered in the 1930s, Berle published two joke books, each containing more than 10,000 gags, in his lifetime. He also owned Berle Comedy Software, which distributed computer discs full of his material.

Born Milton Berlinger in 1908, he was the first superstar of US television. But he began his showbusiness career as a child actor in silent films alongside the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr, before making his vaudeville debut aged 12, becoming one of its top comedians.

He developed a brash, bombastic style modeled on the comic Ted Healy, who was flattered by the imitation. He told the younger man: 'Milton, there's no such thing as an old joke. If you haven't heard it before, it's new'. Becoming a comedy scholar, Berle began a rapacious process of collecting sketch ideas and joke books, reportedly saying once: 'It's not true, I never stole a joke in my life, I just find them before they're lost.'

Berle's sponsored TV show Texaco Star Theater, was the highest rated in the country in 1950, and was heavily credited with driving sales of television sets, and in 1984 he became the first inductee into America's Television Hall of Fame.

– by Jay Richardson

Published: 18 Apr 2013