Khori Johnson is one of the area’s leading comic lights of the last half decade or so.

Now Private Johnson of the US Army, he is making a stop between Colorado and Iraq to grace us with his considerable funny this Sunday. The show starts at eightish sharp at New Belmont, and my hazy-to-absent sense of ethics has no problem suggesting that anybody willing to miss this old-timey humor explosiaganza hates not only America and the troops, but joy as well.

Back when I was doing the weekly show at which Khori launched his life in laughter, it was he who took an erratically attended treehouse meeting and made it an erratically acknowledged social movement. By my design, this was an open mic at the little redneck dive that could, Bayside Inn. Given the faux-pretentious and apparently utterly inaccessible moniker “Cabaret Delirium,” it was distinguished mostly by happening every week and a conspicuous lack of format or standards. Many didn’t understand it. Several didn’t care for it at all. Most never even attended. But from such a quixotic atmosphere came many of the most direct and transcendent moments of comic entertainment I’ve ever witnessed, wherein the barriers between performer, audience, and non-plussed regulars blurred.

Among my greatest pleasures here was seeing the early iterations of Khori Johnson, stand-up dynamo. Seeing as he was stuck in Suffolk sans car, he couldn’t get to Bayside every week, and we had periodic months of estrangement. For Khori, however, if he could not get his ass to Bayside, he would bring Bayside’s ass to the world. At the clubs, he insistently pioneered the psuedo-gang affiliation approach, hollering “Bayside” in his sets like the spirit of S.E. Hinton had invaded four strange guys at Cozzy’s. On MySpace (as was the fashion at the time), he adopted Brendan Kennedy’s emo-tastic spelling “Beicide” (later defined as the murder of a punchline) and compulsively produced promo banners, animation and flyers embodying that which made his comedy so thrilling (while not working as well in graphic design). They were loud, colorful, unhinged by taste or restraint, and entirely exhausting. Also, on the trivial tip, Khori is colorblind.

Khori and I love each other and have professed it. We’ve also weathered more vicious, petty shouting matches and spells of passive-agressive silence than friends ever should, really. Of course, I wouldn’t trade any of this for the world, because Khori is such an ecstatic joy to collaborate and commiserate with and an unbridled pleasure to watch. Content-wise, his material would never be classified as “leftfield” or even “original,” but seeing Khori dance and dash through years of familiar tropes somehow imbues a fresh sense of enthusiasm and giddiness to them. The man is a genius for coming up with what is known in the biz as “dumb shit that is incredibly gratifying to yell over and over again,” which is not nearly as easy as people think.

While Khori’s passionate/alienating nature sometimes kept him from maintaining contacts or job security, I doubt anybody really wanted him to enlist. Will a Khori Johnson with personal discipline, a steady job, and economic security be the same blazing blast of bluster we came to know and love and get pissed off at and hate and then miss and then reconcile with and then love all over again? Not entirely, of course, we all change in time. I’m fairly sure the good stuff that made him so special has made it through in tact. Boot camp can’t break that kind of beautiful insanity. I’m looking forward to seeing him, and I know he has a wild few years of experience to share. And from there? Well, as I say about all the deployed troops that I like: “Not dying over there would be great.”

Watch Khori Johnson’s stand-up performance at New Belmont this Sunday night at 8.