Interviewing Jake and Amir

Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld’s Jake and Amir is the entertainment equivalent of 1990s potato chip slogans – once you start watching, you can’t stop and/or there’s no way you can watch just one.  Here’s a sample, but be warned, you’ll be salivating like Pavlov’s dog for more:

The two twenty-somethings were fortuitously seated across from one another when College Humor

moved to its snazzy New York City headquarters just north of Union Square.  By day, Amir works on writing, producing, and acting in shorts for CHTV, and Jake looks at cute college girls.

But after hours and when they’re not Hardly Working, the pair takes on the persona of a hostile, odd-couple relationship rife with one-way adolescent infatuation and awkward workplace hijinks.

Jake is the chillaxed, everyday, normal guy to Amir’s embodiment of arrested development.  Imagine the movie Big, except if Josh Baskin was the assholic nerd at his high school, obsessed with John Heard‘s character, and possessed no faculties for interpreting basic social cues. That’s Amir.

He eats McDonalds, venerates alcohol, and talks in a bastardized slang because he thinks that’s what the cool kids do.  He also annoys the $%!# out of Jake.  Initially, Jake indulged Amir with frustrated yet helpful advice, but now he’s run out of tolerance.

Each short installment of Jake and Amir is like a new exercise in anger managemet for Jake, a new practice in unintentional juvenile provocation for Amir, and a little bit of wonderful for us viewers.

I recently caught up with the duo to ask them about how the series came to be and how they make the magic happen.  They drifted in and out of character, as well as fistacuffs.

Catch Jake and Amir in action at JakeAndAmir.com.