THE PAJAMA MEN Self Improv-Ment

THE PAJAMA MEN 

Self Improv-Ment

American comedy duo The Pajama Men, aka Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez, present their show In The Middle Of No One at The Astor Theatre on Friday, May 4, and Saturday, May 5, as part of the Perth international Comedy Festival.

Improv - the very word can strike fear into the heart of even the most seasoned comedy veterans. It’s not the challenge of finding material on the fly, but the consequence of failure that chills; flying without a net is awesome, but falling without one can cripple. The Pajama Men, though, take it all in their stride. After all, they’ve been netless for around 12 years now.

“We met in high school when we were auditioning for a high school improv company that only did one show,” Pajama Man Mark Chavez explains. “We did improv after high school with a bigger company. Then we left that little company in Albuquerque and struck out on our own and toured Canada, doing comedy. Then we went to Edinburgh in 2004, which is kind of how we landed here; our career kind of took off in the UK and Australia, and that’s it.”

In that time, they’ve developed a reputation as fearsomely fast and talented improvisational comics, attracting the attention of the legendary Second City comedy juggernaut of Chicago.

“It’s actually not true that we studied at Second City,” Chavez says. “We worked with them. They found us at Edinburgh a while back and they started producing our shows. We actually taught at Second City for a while. It was something I wanted to do when I was much younger - study at Second City - I just never got around to it. I couldn’t afford it, I wasn’t able to go to Chicago at the time. But we ended up working with them, and they’ve always been great to us.”

Though so much of the show is created in the moment, there is still an underlying theme, in this case one that both Chavez and his partner, Shenoah Allen, are intimately familiar with. “It’s about the loneliness of travel, as in whether you’re going to maintain a relationship or whether you’re going to strike out on your own and travel the world, which is something which is very near to our lives. We’re always on the road, and it can be lonesome. But really that’s just an underlying theme. It’s about time travel and an alien and a guy who’s searching for them. It’s an adventure, but really, all of that said, it’s really just a loose structure for us to hang our jokes on. We’re just trying to be ridiculous.”

And that irrepressible sense of the ridiculous is certainly paying off, with a number of exciting projects looming in The Pajama Men’s near future.

“We’re working on television development right now with the BBC out in the UK,” Chavez tells us. “And that’s going really well. We’re also writing a film, so that’s all going well. But we will continue to do live performances for sure, including a totally improvised show that we’re taking to Edinburgh this year. We’ll be taking that to London and Edinburgh.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON