I remember crossing paths with actor Nick Rigg Johnson years ago, before ever actually having met him. “You’re a funny guy,” is all I could think of to say in the awkward moment. But, in retrospect, I think I pretty much got it right.

The Colorado stage community is filled with plenty of funny guys. But it’s rare to find an actor who can consistently draw laughs without even opening his mouth. This year, at least two funnymen stood silently out: Ethan Knowles in BDT Stage’s underappreciated gem, “Something Rotten,” and the truly touched (not sure by what!) Johnson, who in 2023 turned Miners Alley Playhouse into his own personal trailer-park sandbox in two different iterations of the homegrown “Great American Trailer Park Musical” franchise sandwiched between a scene-stealing role as a goofball named Brick in “Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville” in Parker.

“Nick is tirelessly playful to a point where I actually fear it – but I embrace it even more than I fear it,” said Piper Arpan, his director in both “Trailer Park” comedy gems (each conceived by the brilliantly twisted local tunesmith David Nehls).

Johnson played two different characters in the two different “Trailer Park” musicals. In the original, Johnson played Duke, a man determined to win back his stripper girlfriend. OnStage Colorado’s Eric Fitzgerald said Johnson’s antics “left the audience gasping for air.”

But consider one unscripted moment from the holiday-themed “Trailer Park” sequel now playing through Dec. 31 at the new Miners Alley Playhouse Performing Arts Center in Golden. This time, Johnson plays Rufus Jeter, a good guy scraping by on 12 jobs, including playing a Vodka-infused, 99-cent Santa Claus working in a 99-cent retail store. Johnson stops the show as he contorts his imbibed body into settling into Santa’s cheap red inflatable bouncy chair.

But wait. On opening night, Johnson spied an audience member dressed as a (far classier) Santa Claus. Game on. Johnson broke the proverbial fourth wall and chastised this much grander St. Nick for showing him up. The audience lost it. But wait, there’s more. Johnson released the Kraken for castmate Jenna Moll Reyes (who plays a simple gal named Pickles) to then “mistakenly” sitting on the wrong Santa’s lap. It was a moment of unscripted comedy bedlam that will never be repeated.

“That was the greatest fortuitous accident ever,” Arpan said. “I loved it because my heart is in keeping my shows improvisational – within structure. That was a perfect example of artistry in action.”

So, too, was every performance of BDT Stage’s “Something Rotten,” a silly story that imagines how two misguided Renaissance brothers set out to write the world’s first musical. Knowles played two very different characters: The soothsayer Nostradamus and a Puritan who finds the ways of theater sinful. “One is outlandishly funny while the other is funny more through innuendo,” said Artistic Director Seamus McDonough. “Ethan was able to employ two very different comedy styles in one magnificent performance, which is pretty rare.”

Knowles earned the biggest laugh of every show without saying a word. It was simply from an exchange of looks he had with actor Bob Hoppe, one half of the Brothers Bottom. Knowles’ Brother Jeremiah walks into a rehearsal for the aforementioned world’s first musical – and does not like what he sees. When he shouts, “I will give you the rod!” The obvious undertones throw everyone for a laugh loop. “We let that moment linger,” said director Seth Caikowski. “That started a series of looks between the two that would go on for minutes.” Said McDonough: “It would have the audience in stitches.” OnStage Colorado’s Beki Pineda called Knowles “a master at the delayed double take.”

What makes Knowles unique is that he is fearless, Caikowski added. “He does not ever worry about making an awkward situation feel less awkward, either for the actors onstage or for the audience.”

In many ways, Johnson and Knowles are comedy descendants of Wheat Ridge native Matt Zambrano, for years the gold standard of this type of in-the-moment comedy. Zambrano made his own comic waves in 2023 in the Arvada Center’s “The Book Club Play.” And a play he’s co-written for Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company called “Holly, Alaska” makes its world premiere from Dec. 8-31 at the Dairy Arts Center. That’s the story of a tiny group of community-theater actors who are trying to keep their tiny town’s 119-year-old holiday pageant alive.

Johnson, who is originally from Oregon and trained at the famed Second City, can be boisterously laughed at in “The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical” through Dec. 31. Knowles, a graduate of Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, can presently be guffawed at as Reuben in the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.