Zebro sketch team rides wave of video success to New York

It's not uncommon for comics to leave Boston's relatively small pond for New York's bigger audiences and industry connections. After tomorrow, an entire show will leave town as Elisha Yaffe and his Emerson cohorts celebrate the final Zebro show with a performance at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Zebro spent just one year as Boston's only late-Tuesday-night comedy fix, but it caught on quickly with some help from the Web. Early in its run, which began last March, the group held a video contest with a "Snakes on a Plane" theme. They posted their results on YouTube and got caught up in the film's inexplicable zeitgeist. Their videos started showing up in "Planes" coverage on "MTV News" and "Good Morning America," and getting featured on YouTube's home page.

That translated to momentum for the live show, which often packed ImprovBoston's 75-seat Inman Square theater with its mix of sketch, stand-up, video, and single-performer character work. "It was definitely very weird, surreal sometimes," Yaffe says. "We would get people that came in who were in town from Texas, but they had seen the shorts online and wanted to see us live. So I think the Internet helped kind of break the boundaries."

Yaffe is hoping Zebro finds similar success in New York at the People s Improv Theater, also known as the PIT. The PIT is roughly the same size and has a similarly loose and creative feel, which Yaffe credits partly to its new artist director, ex-State member Kevin Allison. Most of Zebro's loose collective of Emerson alums are already in New York for the show's April relaunch. "We're definitely looking forward to having a similar type of small crowd [and a] very interactive show there," Yaffe says. "It does have a lot of the same characteristics."

Tomorrow's farewell show will also be a passing of the torch. Zebro regulars Pat Boccuzzi and Nat Towsen , who open the show at the Coolidge, will try to carry on the show's tradition in their new 8 p.m. Thursday slot at ImprovBoston. Paired with the Untrainables' new "Great and Secret" show, Boccuzzi and Towsen's "Original Zings of Comedy" will feature a mix of some familiar faces from Emerson and stand-ups from the larger comedy community, such as Myq Kaplan and Dan Sally .

Towsen says the show will feature mostly stand-up and character work, with a few twists. There will be a regular five-minute slot for people who have never done comedy before, and a house band that will start to play over any comic who goes over time. Ideally, the show will have a throwback quality, with Towsen and Boccuzzi serving as Rat Pack ringmasters.

"We've been watching a lot of Sid Caesar and 'Texaco Star' revue and a lot of really old television for influences for this sort of thing," Towsen says. "It's a lot more a vaudeville-style show than we're used to."

Boccuzzi and Towsen know that they, and the Untrainables, have to live up to the example set by Zebro and the Walsh Brothers, who created "Great and Secret," but they're hopeful they can create their own tradition. "Those were two shows that just made a name for themselves immediately," Boccuzzi says. "Hopefully, we can do the same."

"Opie and Anthony" regular Jim Norton plays the Comedy Connection tonight and tomorrow. . . . Tony Moschetto plays the Comedy Studio tonight and tomorrow. . . . Corey Manning brings his one-man show, "Confessions of a Black Man," to Hibernian Hall at Roxbury Center for the Arts tomorrow. . . . "Laffapalooza" alum LaVell Crawford plays two shows at the Comedy Connection Sunday.