Harris Wittels was born in Oklahoma City on April 20, 1984, the son of Ellison and Maureen Wittels. He was raised in Houston in the Jewish faith and celebrated his bar mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El, across the street from Rice University. He attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and began doing stand-up comedy at Houston's Laff Stop. Upon graduation Wittles enrolled at Emerson College in Boston and studied television and video production. He graduated in 2006, and shortly afterwards moved to Los Angeles. After some time perfecting his routine at local comedy clubs, he met Sarah Silverman and, at age 22, became a writer on
The Sarah Silverman Program in 2007. He began to make connections, selling comedy bits to other shows, and writing scripts for the 2007 and 2008 MTV Movie Awards. In 2010, Wittels coined the phrase "humblebrag" on Twitter, defining it as "the act of boasting about one's life and then downplaying it". The popularity of the feed led to a book,
Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty, published in 2012.
When T
he Sarah Silverman Program ended in 2010, Wittels became a staff writer and executive story editor for
Parks and Recreation during the show's second season. During the third and fourth seasons, he became co-director, then executive producer, as well as writing several episodes, while also appearing on the show as Harris, a dim-witted animal control employee. In 2012, he was cast as a co-star in Sarah Silverman's NBC pilot
Susan 313 but the series was not picked up. Later in the year, he was hired as a consulting producer for the TV series
Eastbound & Down and co-wrote two episodes. Wittels was a frequent guest on the Earwolf podcast
Comedy Bang! Bang! and liked to read jokes and observations saved on his phone that were deemed to be not good enough for his act. When he wasn't working, he was the drummer for Don't Stop or We'll Die, providing backing vocals as needed. In August 2013, NBC picked up an untitled Wittels sitcom, about a slacker still living with his parents while dealing with his whiz kid younger brother, a multi-millionaire entrepreneur in high school.
On a November 19, 2014 interview on the
You Made It Weird podcast, Wittels openly discussed his personal life and history of drug addiction, revealing that he had done drugs recreationally since he was twelve. His drug usage got out of hand because of a breakup with a woman he felt was perfect for him in every way, except that she and her family were Scientologists, which he described as a deal-breaker. He began to rely on oxycodone to deal with his stress over the relationship, his work on various television pilots, and writing the
Humblebrag book. He had gone to rehab twice after becoming addicted to heroin, and had just gotten out a month earlier. On February 18, 2015, during his stand-up set at The Meltdown, he talked about living sober and said he was in "a good place". The next morning he was found dead in his Los Angeles home. The toxicology report later confirmed that he died of a heroin overdose.
Source
Section 7
Emanu-El Memorial Park
Houston
COORDINATES
29° 40.675, -095° 31.520
