Pair on a roll with their oddball characters
By Nick A. Zaino III, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe, August 26, 2005

Chances are, audiences won't leave tomorrow's Coxen and Johnson sketch show repeating a string of favorite catchphrases. Chris Coxen and Nate Johnson don't follow the usual model of sketch comedy made popular by ''Saturday Night Live": building a skit around a hook meant to be retold around the office the next morning.

The pair, who bring their show to Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway tomorrow, deal in the oddities of characters like the Calendar Boyz, two mullet-wearing failed rockers who star in their own pinup calendar. Or a health-show host hounded by a friendly loser who keeps interrupting an outdoor shoot offering sodas. At their best, the pieces have a surrealistic bent and have more of a cumulative effect than a series of rapid-fire gags.

''I want my character to be a punch line," says Coxen. ''I want people to be able to close their eyes and taste them. They're not even waiting for a punch line, they're just waiting to see what the heck they're going to do."

Coxen and Johnson first met as writers and performers on the Walsh Brothers' ''Great and Secret Show" at ImprovBoston. The show became a springboard for Dan Sally, who now hosts Thursday nights at the Comedy Studio with support from fellow ''Great and Secret" veteran Ben Murray. Coxen and Johnson are hoping for the same kind of success after honing their offbeat performances and video for the past year.

'' 'The Great and Secret' has been the best place, the best environment to do that just because it's such a younger crowd," says Johnson. ''People are more open-minded to hearing anything different and weird."

Those two words describe the pair's partnership. Johnson, 32, is a print production specialist at an investment firm during the day, and Coxen, 31, is a mortgage loan officer. Johnson is the blunt object to Coxen's precision instrument, onstage and off.

"I'll write the sketches, and I'll be very anal about how I write them out and color-code them and make it crystal clear to the tech person what needs reading," says Coxen.
''It's a little disturbing," Johnson says.

Johnson promises to stay as faithful to the script as possible, but he often tweaks the dialogue on the fly. Coxen says the key is that they have developed a trust as performers, and each helps play to the other's strengths.

''He has a great knack for understanding characters and their purpose," Coxen says of Johnson, ''how to keep them consistent, and how to present them in a way that the audience is soaking them up the whole way."

The Walsh Brothers, who will be guests in the show along with Sally, are impressed with what Coxen and Johnson have done.

''In one year, these guys are able to put together a theater show," says Dave Walsh. ''There are no performers [in the local scene] who can do that in one or five years."

Ideally, the pair would like to have their own show, but their short-term goal is to just keep working. ''Our destiny, we're hoping it'll slap us on the face," says Coxen, ''because we're working our butts off so hard to create a creative product."

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

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