A Night at the Improv

Last night, I got to see improv comedians Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (famous from Whose Line Is It Anyway?) appear in a one-night only performance here in town. Sometimes, going to live improv can be a real hit-or-miss proposition. Whose Line is as consistently funny as it is because they tape a lot more material than ever actually airs, and cut the "bad stuff." There's no guarantee that when you see live improv, it's going to score every time.

But man, did they score last night. These two were just non-stop brilliant for what amounted without intermission to two-and-a-half hours of your-face-hurts-from-laughing funny.

Some of the improvs they performed were familiar games to anyone that's watched Whose Line, but very often they were given a different twist. For example, they played the Moving Bodies game (in which the performers can move only if posed by an audience volunteer) with only one volunteer having to move both the performers -- a variation that seriously upped the funny.

They also had games not played on Whose Line (but still likely familiar to fans of improv), such as one in which Brad had to confess to a "crime" that had been constructed from audience suggestions while he was out of the room. From Colin's clues, he had to confess that he had "spray painted a turtle and fed it Triscuits while wearing a banana suit and threatening it with rhubarb in Kanesatake at Genghis Khan's Sheep Shaving Emporium -- with a Q-Tip." And though it probably took like 20 minutes, he did finally get it, with both performers keeping the audience laughing the entire time.

The penultimate game they played was something they dubbed "The Torture Game," because (in rotation) it combined five of the harder improv games around: Questions Only, One-Syllable Words, If You Know What I Mean..., Letter Substitution, and Rap. Torture for them, perhaps. Hilarious for us.

And continuing that torture/hilarity theme was their grand finale, dubbed The Most Dangerous Improv Game in the World. The basic game was the simple enough Alphabet Game, in which the performers must begin each line they invent with the next letter of the alphabet. For a bit of "culture," they also forced themselves to perform the scene as an opera. But for that extra punch that surely no one else had ever done before, they laid out 100 live mouse traps on the stage, then performed the scene in that space -- barefoot and blindfolded. It was cruel and ridiculous and can't-breathe hysterical.

These two are out on the road with their show nearly every weekend. If their schedule takes them anywhere near you, I can't recommend them highly enough. I haven't laughed so hard in years, since the very first time I ever saw an Eddie Izzard stand-up concert. (Though sadly, that wasn't live and in person.) I'm already thinking seriously about heading up to Aspen when they swing back through Colorado in December.

In their own words, they're "that frickin' good."