Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez

The Pajama Men met at La Cueva High School, in the early ’90s in Albuquerque, New Mexico, auditioning for the high school improv team. It was at a time when having three side-by-side mohawks seemed like a good idea to Shenoah, and Mark was annually being voted class clown. They were teenagers. They didn’t know where they were headed, but they found, in each other, a vast ocean of bizarre, imaginary worlds that they chose to live in. The immeasurable blandness of their suburban surroundings became a blank canvas, and they spent their time talking in ridiculous voices to each other, absentmindedly creating long soap operas between characters that they spent more time inhabiting than they did being their “normal” selves. Eventually the lack of creative influences in the vicinity allowed, for better or worse, their unique comic voice to emerge, in the form of partially-improvised, multi-character, narrative-sketch comedy shows. They have since written 9 shows together and toured them to theatres and festivals around the world, often receiving awards and acclaim. Like this: “The Pajama Men create a cartoon of the mind—a shape-shifting world in which anything seems not just possible, but imminent.” ★★★★★  – The Guardian