Jon Hurwitz, always with Hayden Schlossberg, writes comedy about people everyone else has already made up their minds about: the quiet analyst in New Jersey, the bully from 1984. The idea is sharper than the jokes around it, and it has carried him for twenty years.
Fi1m perspective
Harold sits at his desk with his colleagues' weekend work, because they have decided the quiet Asian analyst will not say no, and he does not. Fourteen years later Johnny Lawrence is in the San Fernando Valley, drinking, getting fired and not getting over a tournament he lost in 1984. These are the same scene. Jon Hurwitz, with Hayden Schlossberg and latterly with Josh Heald, writes about people the audience has already filed away, and then asks what it is like to be the person in the file.
He came to it sideways. He studied finance at Wharton, sold an early spec script with Schlossberg, a friend from school, and moved to Hollywood in the early 2000s. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) was the breakthrough, and it is still the sharpest thing he has written: a stoner road comedy whose best joke is that everyone the pair meet has a theory about them, and that the theories are all wrong. He and Schlossberg directed the 2008 sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, then American Reunion (2012), and in 2015, with Heald, moved to television for Cobra Kai (2018), which ran six seasons and 65 episodes.
Cobra Kai is the best case for him. The idea came from a DVD extra in which William Zabka explained that, as he saw it, Johnny Lawrence was not the villain of the film, and the series takes him at his word without pretending he was the hero either. The first two seasons are warmer and better acted than anyone had a right to expect from a sequel to a 1984 teen film. We laughed at Johnny for most of an episode and then, somewhere in the second, found we minded what happened to him, which we had not planned on; Zabka plays the resentment so plainly that it stops being a joke before we notice it has.
The weakness is the same in every form. The idea is a short one and he keeps it running long after it has made its point. Cobra Kai goes on for about three seasons more than it should and starts repeating its own fights and reconciliations. Some critics found American Reunion formulaic and built from recycled gags, and Obliterated (2023), a comedy about drunk special-ops agents, was faulted for raunch without enough wit and for struggling to fill eight episodes. He is good at the first two hours and poor at knowing when they are over.
A new Harold & Kumar film is in development. We would like to see it. We would like it to be one film, and short.
Biography
Jon Hurwitz is an American screenwriter, director and producer. He was born on 15 November 1977 in Byram, New Jersey, and graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
With frequent collaborator Hayden Schlossberg, he wrote the screenplay for Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004). The pair wrote and directed Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) and American Reunion (2012).
Hurwitz created the series Cobra Kai (2018–2025) with Schlossberg and Josh Heald; the trio serve as writers, directors and executive producers. He also created, wrote and directed the series Obliterated (2023).
