Duo from Whose Line entertains Saginaw

March 27, 2006 —

One hundred mousetraps. Sometimes, that is all it takes to get a theatre full of people to laugh. Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood stopped by the Heritage Theatre on Saturday, bringing with them a box full of mousetraps to be used in their comedy show, aptly titled "An Evening with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood."

Known for their recurring roles on the improv comedy hit Whose Line is it Anyway? the duo took the stage as though they had been doing this for years. And in a way, they have. While Mochrie and Sherwood have only been touring together for a short time, they spent the better part of seven years doing episodes of Whose Line on ABC.

Over that span, Sherwood appeared at random as the rotating fourth comic, but Mochrie was very much a staple, one of the core three along with Ryan Stiles and Wayne Brady. It got to the point where you couldn't imagine one of them without the other two. This is why I had my doubts about the live show in Saginaw, especially when I heard that Mochrie and Sherwood would be using games from Whose Line in their act.

"How are they supposed to do hoedown with only two of them?" I asked myself. The answer, simply, was that there was no hoedown.

Instead, they focused on those games that require only two people. And guess what - it worked. I forgot that 25 percent of the jokes used to be about Whose Line host Drew Carey, who was never even mentioned Saturday night. Instead, I just laughed at the absurdity of Mochrie and Sherwood, who play off one another like they know what the other is going to say before he says it.

Besides the games, the live show had one other thing in common with the TV show - audience participation. Nearly every game involved someone from the crowd shouting out suggestions of places with odd names (anyone reading this from Kawkawlin?), picking a page number in the Yellow Pages that Sherwood was flipping through, or even going right up on the stage and getting hands-on experience in the art of improv.

While I never got called upon to supply sound effects for the show, I did have a small role in the night's entertainment. Just like they used to do on television, they passed out index cards to a few audience members so they could write down one sentence about whatever they wanted. Then, during a skit about a Shakespearean hockey team, Mochrie and Sherwood would randomly draw out the cards and read what was written on them.

What did my card say? "Forget Mars, I just discovered life in my pants!"

I can now sleep knowing that I made 2,000 or so people laugh at something really stupid that I wrote. Maybe you had to be there.

And if you weren't there, you missed out. You missed out on Mochrie getting kicked in the groin. You missed out on Sherwood proclaiming, numerous times, that he had a party in his pants. But most importantly, you missed out on a show that can never be performed again because of its uniqueness to the Saginaw audience. See, an improv show is a lot like a Mad Lib. The comics know what will get a laugh, but they just need a few nouns and adverbs to fill in the blanks.

Oh, and what about those one hundred mouse traps? Well, they set those traps all over the stage and walked through them barefoot and blindfolded while trying to play the Alphabet Game. You know, the game where every sentence has to start with the next letter of the alphabet. It took them a while, but they got through it. They started with J and they ended with J. But in between, there were a lot of LOLs.

Okay, maybe I don't have what it takes to be a professional comedian just yet. But if I want to learn a thing or two, I'll wait for these two to come around again. They know what they're doing, and judging from the success of Saturday's show, they'll be doing it for years to come.