Going strong-ish: Graham Wagner (left) and Becky Johnson don't want a sitcom

At Iron Cobra’s show at the Comedy Bar last month, the most inspiring moment happened during a game of “talk with the audience.” Instructed to speak as one character, the audience ordered the improv team comprised of comedians Graham Wagner and Becky Johnson to leave the stage and were left with the lights on, murmuring to themselves.

“It was this really great moment. The audience was left with their decision to make us leave, and was like… ‘What should we do?’” recounts Johnson over a (hungover) breakfast at Lakeview Lunch. “We came back, of course, to let them off the hook, but there was some comedic ideal in it for me — to make the audience stay there alone, left talking to themselves.”

Clearly, Iron Cobra aren’t interested in the kind of improv popularized by Second City entrees and Whose Line Is It Anyway?–style party games. In fact, they’re barely interested in improv at all. With backgrounds in clowning and sketch comedy (Wagner also taught improv to “Shell execs and weirdoes” at age 15 in Alberta), they’re the contrarian badasses to the city’s mainstream outlets: two comedians who’ve never sold out, who tour often in Atlanta and Minneapolis, and who constitute the alternative to Toronto’s alternative comedy scene (a.k.a. the Laugh Sabbath collective). But like any performer who has just turned 30, they’re left stymied by the decision they made when they were 15, wondering what the hell they can do when they can’t do anything else.

“There’s no way to do jokes about how to destroy your own penis onstage and demand, ‘where’s my sitcom?’” says Wagner. “Because we don’t want to ruin Iron Cobra with our ambitions, what I like best about our shows is that they’re simply two people, content to be in the room.”

Two people, that is, who are often very, very funny. Functioning as a girl-boy stream-of-consciousness console, Wagner and Johnson play games with and for the audience, personifying characters created from the crevices of their twisted minds. There are jokes, of course, not to mention the usual swearing and flailing about, but their particular brand of improv combines stand-up’s narrative misanthropy and theatre’s dramatic arc, resulting in scenes both personal and absurdist, built on a molotov cocktail of antagonism and sexual tension.

“There’s definitely an audience or two who think that Becky and I have had weird sex,” says Wagner, who admits that Iron Cobra have a tendency to trick the audience into believing that the confessional stories told onstage are true. “But there’s a motive behind the cruelty. I, for one, am much more comfortable confessing things onstage than I am in life — and sometimes I’ve told crazy truths, things that are really fucked up. Sometimes it’s light though, like bad shits I’ve taken.”

“I think we hit a point where the animosity and bickering between us hit a wall,” says Johnson. “But Graham and I don’t really hate each other when we fight.”

Iron Cobra originally formed as a competitive team during the middle period of Catch 23, a regular improv show based on teams competing for points, their performances rated by a snarky judge and voted on by the audience. (Saturday Night Live’s Tim Meadows will compete next week as part of the Comedy Bar’s first anniversary.) They kept winning and kept coming back, “long enough for us to have done a run of shows,” recounts Johnson.

But part of the problem of being the alternative is never becoming the mainstream. “I don’t think our scene ever became the establishment,” says Wagner, “and I think some people really resent that. There’s a certain neurosis of people who want to be famous but also don’t want to be uncool. Comedians aren’t good at that; their desperation is right on their faces.”

“All I ever wanted was to do these shows,” says Johnson. “Which is why I was incapable of making any money. When you consider the logistics of them — small venues, intimate performances — unless you can really strangle yourself for grant money, you cannot sell enough tickets.”

“We did a $40 show once,” says Wagner, “and I got really stressed out and did a whole routine onstage about how much I didn’t want to be there.”

“Was the $40 show The Comedy Awards?” asks Johnson.

“Yeah, I think so,” he responds. “I really didn’t want to be there.”

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