Jake Hurwitz

Jake Hurwitz was in a relationship with film producer, Bee Shaffer from 2010 to 2012. He met her when her mother, the famous fashion journalist Anna Wintour, became CollegeHumor co-founder, Ricky Van Veen’s assistant. They appeared together at the Webby Awards ceremony in 2010 and moved together to Los Angeles in 2011 but broke up a year later.

Jake Hurwitz was born Jacob Penn Cooper Hurwitz on August 5, 1985 to Samuel and Laura Hurwitz in Spring Glen, Connecticut, USA. He has a Jewish father and Christian mother. As per his father’s wish, he attended Hebrew school and went through the Jewish custom of Bar Mitzvah. However, as a family they also celebrated Christmas and Easter and follow Christianity.

He grew up in a large family with one brother and four sisters. Jake went on to attend Hunter College and pursue research studies at New School University in New York City. While in college, he wrote a column for the comedy website CollegeHumor and became an intern with the company.

His column was very popular in college and as a youngster he wanted to become a comedy sitcom writer. However, destiny had other plans for him.

His first stage performance was in the annual function of his sixth grade. He suffered from stage fright in the beginning, but gradually got over it and started enjoying the response he got from fans.

From being an intern, Jake became a full-time employee of CollegeHumor. In 2009, he was cast for the sitcom, ‘The CollegeHumor Show’ which featured videos from its website. However, the show got negative reviews as it lacked originality. This did not deter him from pursuing a career in comedy.

Things changed for the better when Jake met Amir Blumenfeld at CollegeHumor in 2006 and they became good friends. Both had an extraordinary sense of humour and teamed up to form a comedy duo. Jake received a digital camera for his birthday and Jake and Amir started making videos and posting them on the net. Their very first video, ‘Quick Characters’ was a great success and kick-started their career in a positive direction.

Soon after their initial success, the two friends started their own series ‘Jake and Amir’ and posted on the website, jakeandamir.com. The series had Jake as a normal guy and Amir as his obsessive co-worker who kept getting into trouble. The duo made over 500 episodes in which their humour complements each other perfectly. So much so that it was adopted by CollegeHumor and released on the net as one of their prime shows.

As the serial gained popularity it featured guest artists like Ben Schwartz, Allison Williams, Hoodie Allen and Rick Fox. In 2008, PC Magazine listed ‘Jake and Amir’ among the ‘Top 100 Undiscovered Websites’ and by 2011 they were listed as the ‘15th Best Web-Only Show’ by the magazine.

The first time Jake was hired to do a non CollegeHumor show was when he was selected to host the second season of BFF, ‘A Game Show’ produced for Myspace. The show was a deviation from his usual humour as it followed the format of a dating game. Hurwitz still managed to pack in a lot of his wit into his script to leave an impression. He also wrote the script for and acted in the serial ‘Hardly working’ which ran from 2007 to 2015.

The website ‘JakeandAmir.com’ was awarded the ‘People’s Voice Award’ for ‘Comedy: Long Form or Series’ at the 14th Webby Awards ceremony in 2010.

His most popular online video show is ‘Jake and Amir’ which ran from 2007 to 2015. His other online videos are ‘Hardly Working’ (2007 – 2015), ‘CollegeHumor Originals’ (2010 – 2015) and ‘Lonely and Horny’ (2016).