The Haas Student. A relentless money-seeker. A start-up fanatic. A suit-wearing, go-getting, stock-stalking entrepreneur who’s more eager to take on Wall Street than the Wolf himself.
In reality though, we know this isn’t always true. We know that sometimes even the businessman wears a clown suit, or better yet, is a comedy writer for CollegeHumor.
Amir Blumenfeld graduated from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 2005, and has since been working for the popular comedy website CollegeHumor. What began as a few online submissions to the website between exams eventually landed him a full-time career at the CollegeHumor offices in New York City. Since then, you might have seen him on the popular Web series “Jake and Amir”, as a guest on the television show “Louie”, or on the silver screen in “A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas”.
Now, along with starring in the “Jake and Amir” videos, Blumenfeld co-hosts a comedic advice podcast called ”If I Were You”, where him and Jake Hurwitz read email submissions and attempt to give listeners their own personal, yet not promisingly good, advice.
Since Blumenfeld spends a lot of time answering questions these days, we at Caliber wanted to shoot him a few of our own. No, we weren’t looking for relationship advice. We wanted to know what it took for Blumenfeld to become a full-time comedian, and how (or if) his experience at Cal had anything to do with it.
On Life at Cal
It’s been almost a decade since Blumenfeld was enrolled at UC Berkeley, but the memory of his time as a student is still fresh. He told us it was here that his comedy began to take a more tangible form through video, writing and even a bit of stand-up.
“It was very, very fun being at Berkeley. A lot of joking around,” said Blumenfeld. “I wasn’t the coolest kid on campus, or in the top 90%, really. But I still had a good time.”
Blumenfeld began making videos at UC Berkeley before working at CollegeHumor. “I had friends go to the computer lab and sign up for 50 megabytes of storage then I would log in and upload Windows Media Files and post them to my website,” he said. “Probably like 200 people saw them, but that was sort of the preamble to what I ended up doing.”
As would be expected, there were bumps in the road. Ironically enough, Blumenfeld tried writing for UC Berkeley’s humor magazine, The Heuristic Squelch, but said it wasn’t the comedy niche he was looking for.
“‘The Squelch’ was very ‘comedy-nerdy’ to me. They took themselves a little more seriously than CollegeHumor did. I just never felt like I fit in.”
On Getting Started
For many comedians, “making it” is a steady stream of auditions, putting everything on the line, and hoping to eventually get noticed. For Blumenfeld though, this career took a less conventional route. In fact, Blumenfeld claims he didn’t even have the intention of being a full-time comedian at first, but that writing for CollegeHumor originally began as his version of an extracurricular.
“I pretty much just emailed Ricky [Van Veen], the Editor-In-Chief at the time, and said ‘There are funny articles on your site, I think I can write funny articles,’ and he said ‘alright send me a few.’”
“I was a sophomore then, so about 19. I sent him a couple and he put them online,” he said. “It was cool, it seemed like a lot of people were reading my stuff.”
Blumenfeld told us he wasn’t anticipating any career with CollegeHumor after graduating. To his surprise though, the timeliness of his graduation set him up with what he described as “college 2.0” when he was hired by the company in 2005.
“[CollegeHumor] wasn’t really hiring anybody until I graduated. Those first three years I was just writing for free, then they got a book deal. So they spent their entire advance on hiring two book writers, who ended up being me and my buddy Streeter.”
That early friendship with Streeter Seidell launched Blumenfeld’s comedy career into the online world. After the two finished writing “The CollegeHumor Guide To College,” they began what became known as the “Prank Wars” – a Web series where the two would document pranks pulled on each other.
This early videos quickly became an online hit. In 2009, the same year the two appeared as guests on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”, MTV launched the show “Pranked”, on which Blumenfeld and Seidell were hosts. The show consisted of the two presenting a montage of prank videos found on YouTube. The show lasted about five seasons, but as “Pranked” dwindled off-air, “Jake and Amir” was began taking off.
On Falling in Love (With Jake Hurwitz)
Okay, this segment isn’t actually about Blumenfeld’s love life. It is however, about his partnership with Jake Hurwitz, which has been undoubtedly one of the most popularizing aspects of his career.
The two first met in 2006, a year after Blumenfeld began working at CollegeHumor. Hurwitz was an intern and Blumenfeld was writing the “The CollegeHumor Guide To College” with Seidell.
“We got along quickly. We were making each other laugh pretty much from day one and when we moved offices we sat right across from each other. We have the same exact sense of humor, so that’s….good,” Blumenfeld said laughingly.
The two shot the first episode of “Jake and Amir,” called “Quick Characters,” back in 2007. Now, the series garnishes over 500,000 per episodes on average.
Even after eight years and countless side projects, the premise of “Jake and Amir” has remained in tact. The show centers around two goofy dudes trying to tolerate one another at the office, with Jake as the “normal guy” and Amir is his wacky, mildly deranged co-worker who often experiences delusions of grandeur and has a concerning obsession with Jake (and chicken McNuggets).
When asked what his greatest achievement was, Blumenfeld responded that it wasn’t any award he got or landing a big role. Instead, he said it was the remarkable longevity of “Jake and Amir”.
“Not a lot of people can say they have done a web series for as long as we have. The fact that we have had a video almost every week for seven or eight years straight is probably the biggest achievement to me. Not every video is a work of art, well, I mean many of them are. I would say 80% of them are straight up masterpieces,” he laughed. “But the fact that we have been able to do it for this long without pause is worth something.”
Different Stages
On Dec. 8, 2013, Deadline Hollywood announced that “Jake and Amir” could soon be adapted into a television series, with executive-producer Ed Helms no less (Andy from The Office anyone?).
“We submitted a script to TBS and they went through this whole regime change, so now we are waiting to hear what the new people think,” said Blumenfeld. “If they like it, we’ll shoot it, and if not then we will try to shoot other TV show ideas that aren’t necessarily like “Jake and Amir: The TV Show” but ideas that are created by me and Jake.”
Despite the excitement of pitching a television series, Blumenfeld explained that jumping from two-minute videos to full-length TV episodes isn’t the easiest of transitions.
“Firstly, it’s longer, so that makes it more difficult. I equate it to stacking blocks on each other,” he said. “Every page is a block, so when you only put three blocks on top of each other, it’s harder to mess up. They’re probably going to stand up just fine. But once you are putting like, 40, 50, 60 blocks on top of each other, it only takes one small mistake for the entire stack to collapse.”
“It’s much harder to keep all these blocks in order. The more you write, the more you have to make sure everything makes sense, that all the characters are expressing themselves logically, getting stories across while still being funny. So that’s a difficult challenge,” he said.
Working in television is not a new ambition for Blumenfeld. In fact, he said he had a high school internship related to just that. Still, he said writing for full TV episodes versus the Web series will be new and challenging. “I always thought that [television] was a long shot. Which it still is,” he said. “I’m taking a long shortcut.”
In terms of writing and performing, Blumenfeld has a wide breadth of experience. He says his podcast, “If I Were You”, is completely improvised with the exception of reading aloud the questions that listeners send in. The live performances him and Jake will do however, are tightly scripted, and the “Jake and Amir” videos lie somewhere in between.
“I think I prefer a mixture of improv and scripted comedy,” said Blumenfeld. “It’s good to have a script. I’ve done projects where I am just improvising and all the sudden it’s like ‘uh oh.. I don’t know where this is going, this is dangerous.’ So it’s good to have a good foundation and then from there you can take things different ways.”
Blumenfeld said that of all the mediums through which he works, he is most most comfortable with editing video, then with writing, third with performing, and at the very bottom, live performance.
“At first we were very hesitant to perform live,” said Blumenfeld. “Jake and I are not musical-theater types. A lot of comedians are live performers first and writers second, but we were the opposite, so we really had to get used to the idea of performing live.“
His already timid disposition for live performance may or may have not been influenced by a less-than successful attempt while still a student at Cal. “I did stand-up comedy once at Berkeley and it went horribly so I was still a bit scarred by it. It was very nerve-wracking at first,” he said.
Fortunately though, it seems the two have gotten the hang of it, and Blumenfeld was even able to make up for his stand up experience as a student when “Jake and Amir” performed live at UC Berkeley in 2012.
“I think the comfort also comes with age,” said Blumenfeld. “When we were 23 performing in front of 25 year-olds, that was nerve-wracking because our audience was older than us. Now I’m 31, Jake’s 29 and we are performing in front of college students. It seems like there is less pressure.“
The Social(media)ite
In a business where name and image are what set you a part from others, Blumenfeld said branding yourself can be difficult, but it’s important. That’s because now, he said, all it takes is a camera and Internet access to upload a funny video online and potentially get noticed, and this lower barrier of entry can make finding the “good ones” difficult.
“It’s hard to sell yourself. Us comedians, many of our egos were bruised at a young age so we try to make jokes” he laughed. “It’s hard to be very confident enough to advertise yourself.”
“One of the things I learned was that you have to post on as many platforms as you can. At first I erred on the side of caution, like, ‘I don’t have to post every video, I don’t want to annoy people’. But then my friend Dave who runs CollegeHumor social media said, ’you should be posting things multiple times!’ Overall, you want to put yourself out there as much as possible.” Blumenfeld said.
“[Social media] certainly helps at the very least with distribution,” he continued. “If we were to go and create something else, I know that we are able to access a certain number of people just through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or Reddit. We have built in distribution channels that we can always call upon.”
Blumenfeld says in particular, Reddit is an interesting channel to turn to. This may be due to the fact that “Jake and Amir” has it’s own subreddit- an entire online community whose only common denominator is a steadfast passion for “Jake and Amir” videos.
“We have a very active community on our subreddit. They’re always creating scripts and suggesting ideas, which sometimes slip into our comedy minds,” said Blumenfeld. “To see all these people analyzing our jokes and referencing old videos that I had forgotten about makes me laugh all over again. They’re awesome.”
Blumenfeld will often interact with the commenters on the “Jake and Amir” subreddit. He said he tries to not let the hype get to his head, but joked that “it is fun in a very self-aggrandizing way.”
When asked if his background in business set him up for where he is today, if it prepared him for branding himself and his comedy or for building up the success of his show, Blumenfeld replied by saying “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. Maybe subconsciously?”
“I don’t think much of what I do now revolves around the finance or econ or statistics classes I took,” he said. “I will sometimes play that up in the podcast, my mathematical-analytical side. But I don’t know if I necessarily learned that at school or if I gravitated towards that at school because I was already math-oriented.”
Curtain Call
On Jan. 27, Blumenfeld and Hurwitz announced on their website that “Jake and Amir” would soon see its end.
“In order to start a new chapter we kind of have to finish the first one,” Blumenfeld said. “Making the videos has been so much fun, but we can’t keep doing that, and our podcast, and also pursue bigger goals like writing for television or movies, there’s simply not enough hours in the day.”
But even with “Jake and Amir” coming to a close, the Web series that essentially catapulted the two to where they are now, Blumenfeld assured us that the duo is nowhere near the end of their comedy career. On or off camera, there will always be room for a little funny business.
This article was originally published in Issue 11 of Caliber.
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