- Born
- Birth nameDavid Benjamin Wain
- Height1.80 m
- David Wain was born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
He met the other members of the comedy troupe The State while a film student at NYU, where he graduated from in 1991.
As part of The State, he co-created and co-starred on their self-titled MTV sketch comedy show in the mid 90's. He then continued to work with his State partners on many other projects, beginning with Stella (2005), a nightclub show which then became a series of web shorts and a Comedy Central Series.
His first film as co-writer and director was the indie summer camp comedy Wet Hot American Summer (2001), which was then turned into two mini-series on Netflix.
He has subsequently co-written and directed a total of five feature films, the most successful being Les grands frères (2008).
His most recent feature, Une drôle de fin (2018), is a biopic about Doug Kenney, the founder of National Lampoon.
He is executive producer of the Emmy award winning series Childrens Hospital (2008) as well as its spin-offs Newsreaders (2013) and Medical Police (2020).
He's also worked consistently over the years as an actor, including the recurring role of Rabbi Jewy McJewJew on "Childrens Hospital", a version of himself in his semi-autobiographical web series Wainy Days (2007), and as "Yaron" in the Netflix series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015).- IMDb mini biography by: James Davidson
- SpouseZandy Hartig(2009 - 2015) (divorced, 2 children)
- Frequently casts Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zak Orth, A.D. Miles, Justin Theroux, Zandy Hartig and a lot of his The State (1993) cast members like Michael Ian Black, Kerri Kenney, Joe Lo Truglio, Thomas Lennon, Ken Marino and Michael Showalter.
- Often uses music by Craig Wedren.
- Roommates with Ken Marino in college. They were introduced by mutual friend Craig Wedren, who was also his roommate.
- He and Michael Patrick Jann directed almost everything on "The State.".
- Was in an alternate scene of Présentateur vedette: La légende de Ron Burgundy (2004) with his long-time friend/collaborator Paul Rudd during the Panda Watch: Day 5 report. The scene can be seen on the Unrated version of Anchorman in the Blooper section.
- Frequently names female characters in his films "Beth," in honor of his sister, Beth Wain Brandon.
- The Ten Commandments have been a cornerstone of our society for nearly one hundred years. If you've ever taken a Sunday off, or if you've ever stopped yourself from murdering someone, then you yourself have been following the Ten Commandments without even knowing it.
- At MTV, the average age at the time of everybody there was like 24. So anyway, they were like, "You don't know what you're talking about," excepting that we went back that night and shot, like, three of these pieces on a Hi8 video camera. And then we, like, snuck into NYU and edited them with a little non-linear editing, and stole props from NYU and did these three pieces. Those pieces, as like a total spec demo overnight, ended up being on You Wrote It, You Watch It, and they hired us to do more. They hired us as a sketch group, and we insisted that we work entirely on our own; we didn't want to interact with the rest of the show. We had this incredible cockiness from day one, which, I think, really did serve us. Really from day one. We had worked with ourselves for four years before that, and we were like, "We're the best, we know what we're doing, nobody else does. Fuck the world." And so we had that attitude going in, and what we didn't realize is that all the executives at MTV were like 25, 28, so they thought, "Oh, I guess these guys really know what they're talking about." They put us in a room for about 13 weeks, paid us nothing, and gave us no budget, and said, "Here, you deal with all these pieces." And we ran around. We were our own crew and we did our own little videos for You Watch It.
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