Plenty of pillow talk

"I am truly stoked to be coming back.” The warm, effusive voice of Mark Chavez drifts down the phone line from Los Angeles. Chavez and his partner in comic crime Shenoah Allen make up Pajama Men, a theatrical comedy duo who have, year after year, taken the Australian comedy circuit by storm.

Pajama Men made their MICF debut in 2009 with their show, Versus vs Versus, and left with a rather prestigious souvenir – the Barry Award. They then headed north to the Sydney Comedy Festival, where they picked up two Time Out Sydney Comedy Awards – Best Newcomer and Best of the Fest. Since then, they've regularly sold out their festival appearances around Australia. In fact, their 2011 show, In The Middle Of No One, was so well received, they're bringing it back down under.

Performing in Australia was a long-cherished dream for Chavez, who first hungered to tour when he teamed up with Allen back in 2000. “I was looking at the [Melbourne] Comedy Festival for as long as I knew about it,” he admits. However, an Australian jaunt was out of their reach. “To be perfectly honest, we could never afford to do it because it was too much of a gamble. Travelling to Australia, especially with an unknown theatre show, is not the best business plan,” he laughs. “Actually, if you get into theatrical comedy, you're not really a business man anyway. We looked at going many times, but we could just never make it work.”

Pajama Men were lucky enough to secure a producer who was willing to bring them out to Australia in 2009. It wasn't looking like a particularly lucrative option for Chavez and Allen, but they jumped at it anyway. “Even then, it was never about making money. The producer really just covers us not losing our shirts. It was the opportunity to perform on that side of the planet, which was exciting.” Luckily, the gamble paid off – Pajama Men became the toast of every town they visited, with that swag of aforementioned awards to boot.

Since those heady days, the duo has regularly visited Australia, each time to larger and larger crowds. Hard as it may be to believe now, there was a time when Chavez couldn't even contemplate playing to a fraction of his current audience. “We always thought that we wouldn't work in a room bigger than 200 people, because really, the idea of performing in front of 200 people wasn't something I could even comprehend as a possibility.”