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Talking improv with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood

Talking improv with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood colin-mochrie-brad-sherwood-1.jpg
Colin Mochrie and Bradley Sherwood in “costume” from the mousetrap skit.
PRIME submitted photo

        By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com

        Bradley Sherwood and Colin Mochrie both dreamed of careers in marine biology when they were in high school.
        The way they make their living today couldn’t be further from that.
        These two men  – one who makes his home in Toronto, Canada, the other in Las Vegas, Nevada – spend their time turning words and phrases into physical, visual comedy  – to the delight of live and television audiences worldwide.
        What the do is called “improv,” an unscripted, spontaneous, play-off-one -another’s-actions type of comedy that’s fresh and different – and a challenge – every time they take the stage.
        You might have caught their performances on Drew Carey’s “Whose Line is it Anyway” comedy show, which ran on the ABC and ABC Family T.V. channels from 1998 to 2007.
        Or maybe you’ve seen them on the recent revival of “Whose Line” hosted by Aisha Tyler on the CW, which was renewed last fall for a fourth successful season.
        On May 1, you can catch their act live, as these two comedy veterans bring their “Two Man Group” road show to Symphony Hall in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, for a 7 p.m. performance.
        PRIME recently had the opportunity to catch up with these two talented performers during stops at their home bases. Here’s what they had to say about comedy, careers and how they formed the “Two Man Group.”

Sharing a love of funny
        “I actually met [Brad] before ‘Whose Line,’ the 58 year-old Mochrie, a veteran of both the original British and the American versions of the comedy improv show, explained. “My wife and her writing partner had created a show that was being produced in L. A – it was produced at Second City [comedy club] and he got hired for that– and shortly after that he got hired for the British “Whose Line” [and] was on it and we’ve know each other for about 26 years now.”
        He said the idea for the “Two Man Group” show came out of live performances he and Sherwood took part in while they were both working on Drew Carey’s “Whose Line” show for ABC.
        “We were in the middle of filming ‘Whose Line’ with Drew Carey and every Super Bowl weekend Drew would take us down to Las Vegas and we would do shows at Caesar’s or MGM,” Mochrie recalled. “There were 12 of us and we didn’t get much stage time and Brad said he was thinking about doing a two-man show.
        “We did a week’s trial and it went well and 14 years later, we’re still doing it,” Mochrie added.
        The 51-year old Sherwood said hitting the road together made sense for the two improv masters.
        “We both love performing and when we do ‘Whose Line’ we tape over the course of three or four weekends in a year, and we’re done. That’s not a full-time job, or a full-time profession,” Sherwood observed.
        The “Two Man” show, he noted, gives both performers time to pursue other gigs, if they wish.
        “We just go out on the weekends, we’re don’t go out like a band for three months [on tour],” Sherwood said. “We do a couple of weekends a month. We’re back home from Sunday through Wednesday or Thursday.”
        Sherwood said the pair typically perform in about three shows over the course of a weekend.
        “We both fly from home to the first show, travel together and after the last show, fly home to our respective wives,” he said.

From science to the stage
        Both Sherwood and Mochrie said they discovered improv while in college, but it wasn’t necessarily a direct path to funny for either performer.
        “I was actually planning to become a marine biologist,” Mochrie admitted. “I was heavily into the sciences in high school, kind of quiet and shy – a bookworm– and a friend dared me to try out for the school play
        “I did, and got it, and got my first laugh and that was the end of my marine biology career,” he added.
    Mochrie instead attended theater school, where he first saw improv performed. Shortly after that he and some friends started getting together to do improv on weekends.
        “It was something I loved doing, but not something I thought was going to make money, I never thought it was going to be a career,” Mochrie said.
        Though he, too, had initial aspirations for a marine biology career, Sherwood said being funny was always a part of him.
        “I liked being funny when I was a kid,” Sherwood admitted, “I would read funny things, watch funny things. I liked making my friends laugh.
        I began acting when I was like, eight, and I never turned back” he continued. “It was children’s repertoire theater in Chicago that did like summer plays, and then I got involved in doing it in fourth or fifth grade and I kept doing plays all the way through high school and college.”
        An “all in” college theater major, he said he tried his hand at improv while still in school, thought it was “pretty great” and decide to go for it as a career.
        “I tried standup but to me that was more terrifying than going out there not knowing what I was going to do,” Sherwood said. “Going out there with a list of jokes I’d written, if the first one doesn’t work it’s like, ‘those people don’t think I’m funny’ – and if the second one doesn’t work, you have a long way to go.
        “Live theater is a lot like improv,” he observed. “Someone forgets their line or misses an entrance or a prop breaks and you have to figure it out.”

What is improv, anyway?
        Improv, Sherwood said, is like “mental martial arts” – you have to be prepared for whatever suggestion or skit idea a fellow performer is going to throw at you.
        “You can practice for Karate and Kung Fu but in [reality] you don’t know what someone is going to do against you, you have to have the mental reflexes to sort it out,” Sherwood explained.  Performing improv onstage, he added, is much the same concept.
        “You don’t have an idea of what you are going to do or what [your fellow comedian] is planning, you just know you have to have a way to make something funny,” he said. “What people don’t understand is that all other art forms are perfection by repetition  – when you get good at concert piano it’s note by note of exactly how it was written, maybe 800 years ago.
        “In improv, to be the best you can be you have to do it all over each time,” Sherwood continued. “You just have to trust yourself to make things funny. It’s very counterintuitive to the normal thought process of your brain.”
        Mochrie referred to performing improv live onstage as “the closest we’ll ever get to death-defying.
        “I’m never going to jump out of a plane or ride unicycle across the Grand Canyon, but there’s something very exciting about going out in front of an audience with absolutely nothing prepared and trying to come up with a show for them,” he said.

The “Two Man Group” experience
        So, what is it really like to see these two men preform live? According to Mochrie and Sherwood, it’s a fun, funny, totally interactive two-hour audience experience that’s never the same from performance to performance.
        “I expect [the audience] to laugh ‘till their stomachs hurt and possibly pee their pants,” Sherwood said.
        According to Mochrie, the audience at a “Two Man’ show is, in a sense, the “third man” in their comedy troupe.
        “All the suggestions for the scenes come from them and we have [members of] the audience on stage for about 80 percent [of the show],” Mochrie said. “We expect our audience to work – you just can’t sit there and watch.
        “We want them to get to the top of their intelligence. We want suggestions that inspire us and make the show more fun. Even more than T.V., this show is interactive,” Mochrie continued.
        Some suggestions they won’t do – gynecologist and proctologist skits are definitely out – but for the most part they are looking for the audience to challenge them to bring the funny.
        “They will be giving us the ideas [and] they want us to be a success because they give us the ideas, [yet] they want to see us in trouble but want to see you get out of it,” Mochrie explained.  
        To get the evening started, Sherwood said he and Mochrie will sketch out a list of “games” – skit ideas – that they might need to use to warm the audience up before the suggestions start, being careful not to repeat gags they might have done for an audience in a venue they have played in the past.
        “We keep records of what we’ve done,” Sherwood noted.
        And whenever the comedians perform, they strive to keep the show family friendly.
        “We have audiences from eight to 80,” Mochrie said. “[Our show is] never more risqué than the T.V. show. We try to be aware that a lot of families come to the show, so we’re kind.”
        Backstage before the performance, Mochrie said you’d find the two performers playing cards or word games on their phones, chilling out before the work of being funny begins.
        “We originally spent a lot of time figuring out what we were going to ask [the audience] first, then laziness took over and we thought – ‘why are we doing all this work?’,” Mochrie said. “We laid down the [suggestion] cards and just asked questions and that gives the audience a chance to think outside the box.”

    For tickets to  “Two Man Group – Live and Dangerous Comedy” with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood at 7 p.m. on May 1 at Symphony Hall in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, call 413-788-7033 or visit www.symphonyhall.com/shows/colin-mochrie-and-brad-sherwood-two-man-group/