Robert Cohen (scénariste)

Origins and early life

Robert Cohen was born to a Jewish family in Calgary, Alberta, where he attended the Calgary Hebrew School, and he is the elder brother of Joel H. Cohen, who would write more than thirty episodes of The Simpsons after him.

Work and career

He left Canada for American television comedy and wrote for The Wonder Years and for The Ben Stiller Show, the short-lived sketch series that won an Emmy the year after Fox cancelled it and that launched a generation of comic writers. He wrote for The Simpsons in its third season, and his episode Flaming Moe's, in which Moe steals Homer's cocktail recipe and turns his bar into the most fashionable place in Springfield, is among the most quoted of the show's early years.

He later wrote and produced for The Big Bang Theory, one of the most widely watched American sitcoms of its decade. His career and his brother's make the Cohens of Calgary an unusual case in the history of the show: two brothers from the same Jewish family of the Canadian prairies, writing for Springfield twenty years apart, the younger one eventually writing the episode in which Krusty the Clown finally has the bar mitzvah he never had as a boy.