Seattle can’t get enough of everything Scott Shoemaker and Freddy Molitch create. If you’re unfamiliar, Shoemaker and Molitch are the artists behind annual traditions such as the ’80s, pill-popping, cartoonish hijinks of Ms. Pak-Man, and the wild holiday phenomenon Scott Shoemaker’s War on Christmas. Thankfully, their theatrical company—Shoes and Pants Productions—will be adding Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! to their recurring arsenal of iconic shows to give fans a fix between seasons.

If you were lucky, you caught :Probed! at Re-bar back in 2019 before the world shut down. We’ve been living in a dystopian sci-fi thriller ever since, so what better time to dive into an investigation of aliens, Bigfoot, ghosts, and fraud channelers? Shoes and Pants Productions has cracked the code on cabaret-style theater with a multimedia spectacle of hilarious videos, brilliant character acting, and song parodies so good you’ll forget the original lyrics. They’re also known for their fantastical costumes, outrageous props, and delightfully outlandish plots, so :Probed! is sure to put the extra in extraterrestrial.

The structure Shoemaker and Molitch have developed comes from a deep understanding of their audiences. “We both have the same idea about how a show works and what kind of experience we want the audience to have. We have a lot of respect for our audience,” Shoemaker says. “We really want to make sure that we’re giving people surprises, trying new things out, putting on a big spectacle.”

That commitment to surprise sets :Probed! apart from their other works in unique and exciting ways. “It is actually really different, a lot of the video is definitely more elaborate,” Shoemaker says. “I personally get to play a lot of different characters, which is great. Freddy’s really good at researching real things and making them funny. Obscure things and weird things. I would say you’re going to see Bigfoot in a new light.” The two list in tandem, “gay Bigfoot, gay ghosts, gay aliens—the paranormal is particularly queer.”

What makes these shows so special is rooted in the creative process the genius pair have cultivated. Romantic partners of 18 years, Shoemaker and Molitch are in a constant mode of creation. “We’re together all the time. I work from home now, and it’s just something that we talk about constantly,” Shoemaker says. “The ideas will just come, we write little things down, and finally, when it’s time to actually write, there’s all this stuff to pull from.” Molitch adds, “It’s just a constant little trickling in. And then we make a big outline of what we’re going to do; the marbles just fall into place.”

Both Molitch and Shoemaker draw from personal experiences, interests, and niche obsessions to keep fervor behind their creations. You might catch references to Unsolved Mysteries, In Search of… with Leonard Nimoy, and other supernatural classics. “I remember thinking, okay, we want to do another show to just diversify,” Molitch says. “What are we into? What do we spend our time looking at and researching? And it was all these paranormal shows; we just are constantly watching stuff like that. We think it’s hilarious and interesting.” Shoemaker adds, “I believe when we were at Disneyland, Freddy just thought of the title :Probed! If you pronounce the punctuation, it’s actually called Scott Shoemaker’s Colon Probed.”

The burning question: How much of the show comes from their personal encounters of the third kind? “The show is obviously poking fun at all this stuff,” Schoemaker says, “but we are both ‘want to believe’ people. Both of us are very skeptical and rational, but we’re also fully into it and would love it to be real. It’s a good balance—we know a lot about it because we like it, but we can also kind of poke fun at it at the same time.” Molitch has had a fair share of ghostly experiences. “I grew up in really old houses, and my whole life I’ve always seen ghost things and weird stuff. I believe in a lot of it, but there’s also enough there to make fun of. Making fun of something doesn’t mean we don’t love it.” Shoemaker has had striking encounters of a small white hand playing tug-of-war with him over a curtain and the sound of seats thumping in an empty, dark theater.

We will have to see if the Intiman Cabaret has its own spirits! Intiman has transformed the old Erickson Theatre into a cocktail lounge-style cabaret featuring a season of one-person plays, drag, performance art, and musical acts. The refurbished space has come up at a very needed time for venues, especially ones that highlight variety shows, cabaret, queer art, and alternative performance. “Seattle just does not have very many performance spaces right now,” Shoemaker says. “Intiman approached us about being a part of their new series. They wanted to make a space for artists like us—the kind of   people that worked at Re-bar, you know, the kind of people that do fringe theater, multimedia, multi-discipline, weirder stuff.”

Shoemaker and Molitch aren’t just keeping Seattle weird in their theatrical style, the subject matter of :Probed! is actually very connected to PNW history. We all know you can’t drive half an hour outside Seattle without seeing a Bigfoot-themed coffee shop, but it turns out Washington has been home to many big cultural moments around the paranormal. “Ramtha lives in Yelm,” says Molitch, referring to the entity that School of Enlightenment founder J.Z. Knight purports to channel. “Even the term flying saucer was coined here by a pilot who saw UFOs by Mount Rainier.”

Whether you believe in creatures from the beyond or not, :Probed! is worth it for the night of assured laughter. A personal favorite trait of Shoes and Pants Productions is that they hit the sweet spot of both acknowledging the world around us while also offering the levity to laugh about it. “People like to laugh about things that actually seriously affected their lives,” Shoemaker says. “To be able to laugh about it relieves the pressure. We’re absurdists at heart, really. The real thing is that life is just absurd and we’re reflecting that. We’re all acknowledging that all of this is just fucking ridiculous, and we need to laugh at it.”

Molitch adds a note to their audiences: “Thank you for trusting us. Letting us put on bizarre, weird, extreme things. Every time we do a show, we’re a little like, have we gone too weird? Should we say this? Should we make these jokes? And then the audience pays us back so many times over with getting it, and being into it. We can get weirder. We can go further, and that’s such a gift to be given, especially when we can really get out there.”

“Really out there” is a great way to describe 2025 so far, too, so you’ll want to cope by marking your calendar for a full year of camptastic Shoes and Pants shows: Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! is just around the corner, followed by the fan-favorite Ms. Pak-Man in June at the Triple Door, there are rumblings of a Halloween Hextravaganza, and you never want to miss Scott Shoemaker’s War on Christmas. After all, like Shoemaker says: “Laughing is good in the face of adversity, and that’s how you deal with problems.”

Scott Shoemaker’s :Probed! runs April 10–13 at the Intiman Cabaret at Erickson Theatre, 21+.