By Victor Greto
Colin and Brad have it easy.
They’re completely unlike other harder working comedians – especially those of the stand-up variety who go on stage all by their lonesomes with a variety of jokes and sketches while silently quaking in fear of displeasing a determined audience.
The comedy duo cut their improv teeth on the British and American versions of the popular television show, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” mugging with the likes of Ryan Stiles and Wayne Brady.
Colin and Brad confess they go out on stage with their minds empty. Which is not that hard to do when you’re in the improv zone.
“We say to the audience, it’s as much your show as ours,” Brad says. “And once they see that we’re flying by the seat of our pants, they enjoy it.”
Both Colin and Brad equate their audience’s giddy engagement akin to kids watching a magician.
“Part of it is the magic aspect of it, taking nothing and making something in front of your eyes,” Colin says. “A lot of people go to improv shows thinking they’re there to see what the trick is. It’s our mission every night to say that it’s completely improvised.”
Brad Sherwood, 45, an only child and perennial class clown, says he always wanted attention as he fought through a lonely childhood in Santa Fe and became an actor. He now lives in California.
Colin Mochrie, 52, a native of Scotland and the oldest of three siblings, was painfully shy, wanted to be marine biologist, and didn’t want anyone to look at him too long. He now lives in Toronto.
Talking to Colin is like talking to a guy who, well, would rather be reading.
“I was a good kid, very quiet, studious,” he says. “I wanted to be a scientist.”
Talking to Brad is like talking to the dude in school who couldn’t shut up.
“I was starved for attention,” he says. “That made me more outgoing than the average kid. A lot of kids with siblings become an amalgam, a three-headed child. I got to be who I wanted to be, a class clown, mostly surrounded by adults. I became verbal and liked making people laugh.”
Unlike Brad, who courts an audience as passionately as Lancelot courted Guinevere, Colin stumbled into comedy, a would-be scientist who had been missing the forest for the trees.
He discovered he liked being laughed at, the key to being a straight man.
Colin played the undertaker in a high school play, and all he did, he says, was walk out on stage. People laughed.
“When I got my first laugh it changed everything,” he says. “I guess it triggered that part of my brain where addiction lives.”
It’s true. All he needs to do is look deadpan, even helpless, and people laugh.
Takes a strong and malleable ego to live through that. Colin’s the kind of guy that’s funny because he looks so serious, as natural a straight man as Bud Abbott to a befuddled Lou Costello.
Colin’s shtick is to keep his expression straight while the rest of his body moves. Although the latter is not as easy as it used to be – “I just had a knee operation” – he’s full of life for the two hours of performance.
“Once you get in front of an audience there to see you and you have no show, it’s amazing what energy you get,” he says.
By contrast, everything about Brad curves, including his eyes that often seem to tell the audience, “Come on, you know this is funny – or at last silly.”
“It’s in the doing,” Brad says of improv. “How do you become a really good blues guitarist? You play over and over again. With improv, you get into groups and you perform, do workshops, comedy clubs or small theater, learning how to make an audience laugh.”
Like any profession, performing improvisationally is a developed skill. And it hurts on the way up.
“You get a lot of bruises,” Brad says. “You have to fall flat on your face till you get good at it.”
Unlike the props often used on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Colin and Brad say they go out on the stage with nothing but their wits.
“Over the seven years (they’ve been doing their two-man show since 2003), we’ve adapted, moving bodies – people move us like we’re puppets – the sound effects game, where they provide the sound,” Colin says.
There’s also the mousetrap game, for instance, where the two imagine 100 live mousetraps around them as they march barefoot and blindfolded while making up an opera.
Makes perfect sense.
“There’s something powerful about getting a roomful of people to have a communal experience,” Brad says. “The more the audience is on stage, the more I like it, because the less in control of the situation we are, the more challenging it is to make fun of it. We’re constantly having to adapt and work at the highest of our improv skills.”
But the audience isn’t enough.
“You need someone else who also is skilled,” Brad says. “The audience is the obstacle that you work around in a funny way.”
No matter how different Brad is from Colin – in temperament, nationality and childhood background – both say they’ve never quarreled.
“We’ve known each other for 20 years, have been on both versions of the TV show “Whose Line” for 12 years, and we’ve never had one cross word or disagreement,” Brad says.
Which helps explain why their act works. They need each other.
“The beauty of improv is you’re never alone,” Colin says. “That’s the time you hope your partner comes up with something.”
That may seem a small thread to hang your career on – then again, it’s improv.
“If you die, you’re taking friends with you,” Colin says.