Etan Cohen

Etan Cohen is one of the most sought after comedic minds in Hollywood, most recently named “Comedy Writer of the Year” at the 2009 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. In 2008, Cohen joined Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux to co-write the film Tropic Thunder.

Ben Stiller starred in and directed the film, which also featured Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise. The film went on to gross $185 million at the worldwide box office. In the same year, Cohen also wrote the hit animated feature, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa which grossed $594 million worldwide. Cohen began his career at 19 while studying in a Jewish seminary on the West Bank in Israel, when he wrote a spec episode of “Beavis and Butthead” and made a cold submission to the show’s staff. Mike Judge, who created and was running the show, read it and asked Cohen to start writing for “Beavis and Butthead” immediately.

Cohen is a 2009 LA Fellow in the Wexner Foundation's Wexner Heritage Program, is involved in AIPAC's New Leadership Network, and local education programs in the Los Angeles area.

His sophomore year at Harvard coincided with the beginning of what became a three-year stint writing for the popular series. Among the episodes he wrote was one that featured “Beavis” and “Butthead” counterfeiting money by simply photocopying it and, shortly thereafter, a group of Columbia University students were found to have adopted the counterfeiting process they saw in the episode. Cohen graduated from Harvard with a degree in Yiddish and moved to Los Angeles. Once there, he entered into a deal with Disney Television Animation.

After that, he went to be a staff writer on ABC’s “It’s Like, You Know.” Cohen was then recruited by Judge to work on FOX’s “King of the Hill” as a story editor and ended his stint there as co-executive producer. During that time, Cohen signed an overall deal with FOX TV and won an Annie Award for outstanding writing in animation for the episode “Ceci N’est Pas Une King of the Hill” (2004). During that period, Cohen began writing feature scripts. The first was the Mike Judge directed comedy Idiocracy which starred Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. Cohen has since transitioned into exclusively writing features. Upcoming projects for Cohen include writing a humorous taking of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, set to star Sacha Baron Cohen as “Sherlock Holmes” and Will Ferrell as his sidekick, “Doctor Watson”. In addition, Cohen will also be penning the script for a live-action version of the Hasbro board game, Candy Land.

Cohen currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.