The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe featured a likeable comic duo in pajamas with imaginations as elastic as their faces. The titular garment – spelt the American way after their nationality – suggested both excitable role-play after lights out and those internally logical narratives we visit in our sleep. Their enacted tales of ghouls and freaks, nutters and natterers made only a perfunctionary effort to cohere, but audiences collapsed with laughter and the Pajama Men have now twice taken up residence at the Soho Theatre in London. They’re back again and this time everything has changed – including the venue itself, which has just opened a clubbier basement space - so that everything can stay side-splittingly the same.
That last show - The Last Stand to Reason - was notionally set on a train whose grotesque gallery of characters careered across the great American outback like escapees from Royston Vasey. There’s nothing so domesticated about In the Middle of No One (they do like their Lennonesque titles) which begins with a mother in labour being rushed to hospital to give birth. The place is teeming with gargoyles – the Pajama Men can’t see someone down a long corridor without being eager to give them voice and physical embodiment – and it seems to be crystallising into a hospital drama a thousand times less grounded than Scrubs (Mark Chavez, the curly-haired darker Pajama Man, even looks a bit like Zach Braff).
Then the father of the mother of the baby, a gravel-voiced hero, announces his departure to explore the galaxy, and we are suddenly catapulted into the kind of continuum that is the Pajama Men’s natural home: a place utterly without boundaries to which the rules of social interaction weirdly still apply. Maybe it’s got something to do with coming from New Mexico: they’re already at the gateway to space anyway.
Quoting these flights of fancy out of context, and indeed any further summary of so-called plot, would be fruitless. They’ve made a valiant effort to create what passes for a coherent narrative on Planet Pajama. But really the pleasures are in the random and the incidental, the passing and the strange. Two alien overlords convene a slightly dysfunctional council. Or two immigrants debate the best type of knife to defend yourself with. Along the way we encounter a freaky menagerie – zebras and leopards who dress like sluts, a gloriously improvised centaur, an octopenis, a Latin American bird in a near constant state of multi-orgasmic ecstasy.
The suspicion delightfully lurks that the two of them are one blink, one banana skin away from extemporising the whole show. Sometimes that actually happens, but the corpsing is incorporated and they seem to enjoy themselves more than ever because what they love above all is to show the cogs whirring. “Let’s keep this scene,” one said last night when they got accidentally trapped in a joke loop. “I think we will,” replied the other.
It’s difficult to say where their remarkable dexterity is most pronounced – physically, vocally or verbally. One scene in which they play marionettes in the grip of a malign puppeteer is an outlandish visual riff. They are also fluent in mechanical robot beeps, as well as a nonsense combination of French and Chinese. But then the pleasure they take in words is palpable.
Chavez and Shenoah Allen, who is blonder and more bug-eyed, are joined on stage by Kevin Hume, a very retiring musician off whom imaginary spittle ricochets and who bursts into beautiful voice at the end. This show flags a little here and there, which after an opening of such relentless invention is almost a mercy. But if anything it is more brilliant than last time round. So long as you don’t insist on military-medium stand-up about the state we’re in, and don’t mind comedy that’s high on hallucinogens, The Pajama Men could not be more warmly recommended. If you’ve got a granny, stick her on eBay if that's what it takes. Just make sure you go.
Book tickets for The Pajama Men at Soho Theatre until 2 July then touring in November
