Colin Mochrie feature interview 

• Courtesy Photo

Comedian Colin Mochrie has been one of the most public faces of improv comedy for more than 30 years, including his stints as a cast member on both the British and American incarnations of the TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway? Ahead of a performance in Salt Lake City with his longtime live improv partner Brad Sherwood, Mochrie spoke to City Weekly.

City Weekly: I was reading an interview you gave earlier this year, in which you were talking about your early years in improv, having to pull people in off the street. Whose Line Is It Anyway? certainly played a huge role in bringing improv comedy to a mass audience. Do you take a certain pride in having been part of that?
Colin Mochrie: Absolutely. When I started this, I never thought, "This is going to be my life's work." It was just something fun to do on the weekends. Then, [Whose Line] was the forefront of improv. Not a lot of people knew about improv before Whose Line, but I always say, it's not the be-all and end-all of improv; it's your gateway drug. For TV, it has to be short and punchy; there's a lot of great long-form improv, too.

CW: Do you watch other improv performances, maybe checking out shows in cities you're traveling to?
CM: It depends. It's really hard to just watch if it's short-form, something like Whose Line. Either I want to jump up and do it with them, or go, "Why are they so good?" I did the Edinburgh Fringe a couple years, and I would go to types of improv that I wouldn't necessarily be great at. There's a group called Showstoppers, where they get a title, a type of musical theater, and then they just do a full-blown musical. ... I like to see things that are different. I actually did a Dungeons & Dragons long-form improv. And I know absolutely nothing about the game. So I was making some bold choices. I was a cleric, and trying to fly out of danger, which apparently you can't do.

CW: What is it in particular about the dynamic between you and Brad that you think makes for a successful creative partnership?
CM: We knew each other before Whose Line, had a long friendship. It's kind of a sibling relationship on stage, where he's the young, irritating brother, and I make fun of him. Brad is a wordsmith, one of those people who knows a little bit about everything. I'm goofy, I guess, and a little bit surreal. But in terms of who's the "straight man," that shifts from scene to scene.

CW: Your show with Brad is called Scared Scriptless, which suggests there's an element of fear in what you do, but is that still true for you? Is there actually still a concern after so many years that "wow, we could definitely crash and burn tonight?"
CM: At this point, we have failed a lot. We have a fairly good success rate, but we can still vomit at any time. Any time we walk on stage is a 50/50 proposition. People know us from television, and they're giving us the information, so we have a little more leeway to suck. But we also have years of experience, and we know how to go, "Okay, time to move on to the next scene."

CW: Do you find that individual cities shape the form of the shows?
CM: A lot of cities do, especially the bigger cities. Boston can be a tough town for comedy. People are very open with their displeasure and their love. Chicago is an improv town, so maybe they're a little more judgmental. I think what helps us is, off the top we say, we're not going to do anything political, because it does really divide the audience. When they give us local references, part of the fun is we don't know those references.

CW: You incorporate audience members into your shows. Is there a particular example of how that can go a little sideways?
CM: We have this one game where we have six volunteers on stage, taking turns inserting things into a scene, MadLib style. A lot of audience members have no idea about story structure, so they're not working towards any sort of arc. So anything they give us sort of derails what the last suggestion was. And that becomes one of our most challenging games.

CW: What is the most common misperception you think people have about the art of improv?
CM: People still think there's a trick to it. They think somehow we've come up with a scenario for every suggestion we might get. They don't realize how lazy we really are. We have our list of games we're playing, and that's it. It's hard for people who don't improvise to understand why we would do it. For us to have written parts of the scene ahead of time defeats the purpose. It would lose the fun of it.