Even when they aren’t onstage with each other or even in the same room, Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood can’t stop joking around about one another.
“I feel like I’m one of the few people who can figure out how to make that guy funny,” Sherwood said in an interview with the Sun.
“He’s so needy,” Mochrie said in mock exasperation during a separate interview.
If you weren’t familiar with the two comedians and their 14-year history performing together, you might be taken aback by those words. But it’s just the casual ribbing of two improv comics who’ve done more than 700 shows together and don’t plan on stopping anytime in the near future.
Fans of comedy instantly recognize Mochrie and Sherwood as two of the stars of Whose Line Is It Anyway? On April 28, the pair will be on the Central Coast for an improv show called An Evening with Colin and Brad at the Chumash Casino Resort. The show features the same kind of improvisational sketch comedy that fans of the television show have grown to love over the years.
“The whole show is very interactive, even more so than the television show,” Sherwood said.
Sherwood fell in love with improv comedy at a young age, performing with various troupes around the U.S. including Chicago’s famed Second City. He said while being on a hit show like Whose Line Is It Anyway? is an excellent vehicle that makes it possible to gain recognition, he prefers the experience of a live theater show.
“You don’t have to be in the control of a producer or worry about commercial breaks and things like that,” he explained. “It’s more about the live audience.”
For the uninitiated, Whose Line Is It Anyway? is an improv show that features a group of four comedians—Sherwood, Mochrie, Ryan Stiles, and Wayne Brady in its current season—and is hosted by comedian and The Price Is Right host Drew Carey. The audience offers suggestions to various themed sketches and Carey buzzes in (often with comedic brilliance) at moments when he finds the jokes unfunny or out of the sketch’s guidelines.
That’s a rather clinical explanation for improv comedy, the specialty of performers Mochrie and Sherwood.
“There’s never any monotony, every show is different,” Sherwood said. “So you can never rest on your laurels. Every time, there are new people, ideas you’ve never heard before. That keeps it fresh, and that keeps it exciting.”
To the outside eye, improvisational comedy seems like the brain surgery of performing. Working on little more than a few brief words and relying on the depths of your imagination isn’t for the stage wary, to say the least. Improv comedians aren’t just walking a tightrope suspended high above the ground without a net—it’s juggling three bowling balls and riding a unicycle backwards on a tightrope without a net.
But Mochrie and Sherwood show no hint of succumbing to stage fright amid all that pressure.
“With every show, if you’re doing it right, it’s all about curve balls,” Sherwood explained. “The moment the audience stops laughing, you’re back at square one.”
Mochrie said the shows never get stale or repetitive, as they both constantly challenge themselves to come up with new games and ideas when they revisit familiar venues.
“We have something like 20 games that we can put in and out,” Mochrie said. “Part of it is we’ve known each other for 20 years. In improv, it really helps if you know someone and trust them.”
Audiences rarely get a chance to have input in other forms of entertainment, Mochrie said.
“The beauty of it is the audience changes,” Mochrie said. “You never get the same audience.”
In an age where comedians often spark more controversy than politicians, Mochrie said he prefers to stay away from hot-button issues because his focus is entirely on what’s best when it comes to entertaining an audience.
“When you start doing politics, you split your audience in half,” he said. “With us it’s just goofy fun, we don’t want anything to do with politics … our stuff is just goofy.”
That doesn’t mean that Mochrie himself shies away from important issues. In January, he sent out a tweet that served both as a message of support for transgender people in general and an announcement that his own daughter, Kinley, was transgender.
“My 90-yr-old mother-in-law and 87-yr-old mother (sic) love and acceptance of our trans daughter warms me,” he wrote in the tweet. “Wonder why some who are younger can’t.”
The responses from the general public were overwhelmingly positive. He said he’s received messages from people in all walks of life, thanking him for bringing up the topic in the public eye and for sharing Kinley’s story.
“I’m glad it did,” Mochrie said. “I don’t think the transgender community needs a white heterosexual man talking for them, but it’s important to get people to learn about it … there’s a lot of ignorance out there, as there is about anything that’s different.”
When asked if they ever get a bout of stage fright or fear that they’ll freeze up under the pressure of performing on the spot, both performers shrug off the idea.
“It’s kind of like your life,” Sherwood said. “You may know you’re going to get up in the morning, but you don’t know what you’re going to say to people or do. Improv is really just a funny version of how the human brain works and adapts all day.”
Mochrie said he encourages people to come and check out their act because, as he put it, “we don’t have a show until the audience shows up.”
Rebecca Rose is so darn funny she writes a humor column twice a month in the Sun. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 4, 2017.
