Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor who first attracted much attention as a voice actor and writer of the Netflix animated series “Big Mouth,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.
His family confirmed his death on Saturday in a statement. The statement did not name a cause.
mr. Knight recently finished filming “First time female director,” a film written and directed by the comedian Chelsea Peretti, as part of a cast with many other comedians.
Since March, he has appeared with fellow comedians Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” a comedy about a group of friends who work at an Indiana casino, which he also helped create. He was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the HBO talk show “Pause With Sam Jay,” for which he was a writer and executive producer.
From 2017 to 2021, Mr. Knight a writer and producer for the popular coming-of-age animated sitcom “Big Mouth”, in which he voiced the recurring character DeVon, a high school classmate of the show’s main characters. In 2019 and 2020, he wrote for the ABC comedy ‘Black-ish’.
In 2018 Mr. Knight one of the comedians who performed 15 minute sets in the first season of the Netflix series “The Comedy Lineup”, which Jason Zinoman of The New York Times praised for his “attempt to give a platform to comics that aren’t household names.”
mr. Knight may not have been a household name, but he had already attracted a lot of attention when he appeared on ‘The Comedy Lineup’. He was named Comedy Central “Comic to Watch” in 2014 and a new face at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival in 2015. In 2018, he was included on a list of “LA Comedian to Watch “by TimeOut Los Angeles”who wrote, “Knight brings so much joy and energy to the stage that he may not even have to be funny – but of course he is.”
He opened for Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher, Hannibal Buress and other leading stand-up comedians. Mr. Chappelle and the animated series ‘The Boondocks’, he once said, were ‘one hundred percent the reasons I do what I do’.
mr. Knight grew up in Seattle and started doing stand-up comedy as a teenager. Biographical information and information about survivors were not immediately available.
While the news of Mr. Knight spread, tribute appeared on social media.
The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that when he performed with Mr. Knight, he knew it was going to be a “funny night.”
“He won a lot,” wrote Mr. Adomian, “all well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off.”