Robert Redford Signed a Drawing of a Red Ford: Inside Alex Leeds's Dumb Drawings

Robert Redford once received a drawing of a red Ford in the mail. He signed it and sent it back.

He was not alone. Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker behind The Civil War and Baseball, signed a drawing of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Sean Bean signed Mr. Bean. Clay Aiken signed a portrait of the nineteenth-century statesman Henry Clay. Stephen Fry signed a drawing of Fry from Futurama. Lance Armstrong signed Stretch Armstrong. Senator Lindsey Graham signed a box of Teddy Grahams, and sportscaster Bob Costas signed a Costco rotisserie chicken.

These are the dumb drawings, and Alex Leeds has been mailing them to famous people for more than a decade.

Leeds is a stand-up comedian and artist from Cincinnati, a regular at the Go Bananas Comedy Club, and the man behind Dumb Drawings Autographed by Celebrities. By his own count he has spent over $5,000 on stamps sending thousands of drawings to movie stars, musicians, athletes, politicians, chefs, wrestlers, and internet personalities, each with a polite request for an autograph. The book collects more than 500 that came back signed, along with Leeds's commentary and jokes about every one of them.

The formula is beautifully simple. Leeds doesn't draw the celebrity. He draws whatever their name sounds like, or whatever they're adjacent to, or whatever will make them squint at the envelope and wonder what on earth is happening. Guy Fieri got Shrek. Jimmy Buffett got a Golden Corral buffet. Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, got a Blockbuster video tape, and signed and returned it in just three weeks, which Leeds points out would have cost him two weeks and two days in late fees if it had been a real rental. Then the celebrity, or somebody in their office, looked at the thing and decided that yes, this deserved a signature.

That is the second joke, and it may be the better one. The drawings are funny, but the fact that so many famous people played along is funnier, and a little revealing about how fame works. When the A.V. Club wrote about the project, its headline said it all: celebrities will sign literally anything.

Not everyone did, of course, and the misses are part of the fun. Neil deGrasse Tyson sent back a signed photo instead of the drawing Leeds had mailed him, an elaborate mash-up of Neil Armstrong, a Mike Tyson face tattoo, and Degrassi. And when Leeds wrote to Jeb Bush asking him to write a foreword, the reply came back in three words: "No can do." The book opens with it anyway, and credits Bush on the title page.

Why do all this? Leeds gives two answers in his introduction, and both are wonderful. The first is that he wanted to do his small part to help the Post Office, because getting mail is fun and he wanted a project that celebrated that. The second is a family grudge nearly three hundred years old. His ancestor Daniel Leeds published the American Almanack, a rival to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. In 1732 Franklin printed a hoax prediction that Daniel's son, Titan Leeds, would soon die, a stunt meant to steal his readers. Titan called Franklin "a fool and a liar" in print. Franklin went ahead and published his obituary anyway. The stunt worked, and the Leeds almanac faded into history. So Leeds, as he explains with a perfectly straight face, published this book to get back at Benjamin Franklin, with a prediction of his own about the Post Office's demise, timed three hundred years to the minute after Franklin's.

It is a very silly premise, and it's executed with real craft. The captions give a quick, deadpan line on who each person is, then twist the knife. It's the kind of book you pick up for a minute and put down an hour later, turning each page to see who else responded. It is also a genuine time capsule. The signatures span generations, from film legends and Hall of Fame athletes to reality TV stars and YouTubers, so a Boomer and a Gen Z reader flipping through it together will each find people the other has never heard of.

The project draws on a real hobby. Autograph collectors call it "through the mail," or TTM: find an address for an agent, studio, or team, write a short and polite letter, enclose one item to sign, and include a self-addressed stamped envelope so the celebrity can send it back without any fuss. Then wait, sometimes for months. Leeds followed all of those rules and changed only one thing, the item inside. If the book inspires you to try it yourself, keep the letter short, always include return postage, and be patient. What you draw is up to you.

Leeds's work has been featured on the A.V. Club and Buzzfeed, and he has been a guest on Cincinnati's Local 12 Morning News. He has performed at comedy festivals across the Midwest, made animated cartoons for stand-up labels, and created the series The Bar Inside an Old Circuit City for Channel 101 in Los Angeles. You can follow the project on Instagram at @dumbcelebdrawings.

Dumb Drawings Autographed by Celebrities by Alex Leeds arrives October 20, 2026, in paperback and hardcover. Pre-order it now.