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mandolinSo, Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (two of the guys from Whose Line is it Anyway? for those not in the know) put on a live improv show at the Weinberg Center in Frederick on Saturday night, and a couple of friends got tickets and invited me along.
Anyone who watched Whose Line knows that Colin and Brad are nuts. I don't think I was aware just how nuts until last night, though.
The first half of the show, they did games you'd expect to have seen on Whose Line? and had audience volunteers. (We were too far back to be picked, I think only the first few rows were targeted.) They had a couple do the "Living Puppets" game with them where the volunteers had to move their arms and legs for them (and yes, there were a lot of dirty jokes coming from that one.) They brought some kids up to honk horns during a skit to make them redo their last line whenever the horns went off, a privilege the kids naturally abused until Colin and Brad ran out of steam. Colin: "I've got one word for their parents: Ritalin."
Then Brad picked a lady from the audience to be their moderator for a series of games - and picked the one person in the audience who had laryngitis. Go Brad. They took one pair of jobs - insurance and tree removal (the latter was chosen because the phone book ad advertised "stump grinding" which Brad was all over) and ran a skit that went through four games:
- Questions Only: Every line had to be a question. The volunteer first read off the wrong game, and blamed cold medicine for it. So Colin's excuse when flubbed a line: "I'm on cold medicine."
- One-Syllable Words: Self-explanatory, and harder than you'd think, especially when Brad asked Colin for a day of the week.
- If You Know What I Mean: Every line is a double entendre. Brad was a lot better at that game than Colin, but that probably means Brad has a dirtier mind. Ruth: "Hey, Colin is Canadian."
- Replace a Letter: Every occurrence of the letter S was replaced with the letter P. This was a lot funnier than it sounded because they went at rapid-fire speed and used the excuse to get away with a few things. You really wouldn't think hearing someone call someone an "apphole" would be so funny.
I don't remember whether or not they did this before or after the four-games-in-one, but they also did Sound Effects, where two audience members had to provide sound effects for their skit about spelunking dentists. The poor woman they picked just could not manage to imitate a sledgehammer, unfortunately. Not that I could have done any better.
Then there was intermission, which consisted of us sitting there and trying to catch our breath before they started up again.
They did another back-and-forth (each one supplying the next word of a sentence) using "dolphin chess" as the subject and then took questions from the audience. Someone asked "What do dolphins play for?" and after Brad and Colin got through the answer (which boiled down to "dolphins play for pride") someone from the audience shouted "Miami!" (So in the ending song, one of their lines was, "We hate that guy who said 'Miami' / For being funnier than us...")
But the last skit... oh, my God. They decided to play the Alphabet Game, in which each response begins with the next letter of the alphabet. (If Colin said a line beginning with C, Brad had to say a line beginning with D, and so on.) The topic was "penguin chasing." Standard game, but then they added several twists: They did it on stage barefoot, blindfolded...
...with 99 live mousetraps spread out all over the stage. (It was 100, but Colin set one off by accident.) They had crew hold up a rope a foot or so away from the edge of the stage to keep them from walking off it and out of range of the audience.
We didn't believe they were going to go through with it. We were wrong.
I lost count of how many times the mousetraps went off before it devolved into blindly throwing mousetraps at one another. (And one break in the actual lines when Colin yelled "Marco!" It reached the point where Brad was reluctant to say his next line and tip off Colin as to his whereabouts; Colin has pretty good aim while blindfolded - and three guesses where he aimed the mousetraps. Then when Brad shut up, Colin took the blindfold off.
I still cannot believe they did that. We speculated that they came up with the idea at 3 am while drunk and then Drew Carey got wind of it and dared them to do it. ...then again, I doubt they'd need to be dared. While I buy that it is all improvised, I'm pretty sure they had to rehearse the blindfolded-with-mousetraps part for safety's sake just so they could get an idea of how much space they had to work with. Which isn't cheating, it's just common sense.
Either way, we were absolutely on the floor. I went to the restroom before the show, thankfully, but didn't get anything to drink for fear I'd wet my pants laughing. I don't know how the Weinberg in Frederick, of all places, booked those guys, but I'm glad they did. That really was worth the fifty bucks.
Anyone who watched Whose Line knows that Colin and Brad are nuts. I don't think I was aware just how nuts until last night, though.
The first half of the show, they did games you'd expect to have seen on Whose Line? and had audience volunteers. (We were too far back to be picked, I think only the first few rows were targeted.) They had a couple do the "Living Puppets" game with them where the volunteers had to move their arms and legs for them (and yes, there were a lot of dirty jokes coming from that one.) They brought some kids up to honk horns during a skit to make them redo their last line whenever the horns went off, a privilege the kids naturally abused until Colin and Brad ran out of steam. Colin: "I've got one word for their parents: Ritalin."
Then Brad picked a lady from the audience to be their moderator for a series of games - and picked the one person in the audience who had laryngitis. Go Brad. They took one pair of jobs - insurance and tree removal (the latter was chosen because the phone book ad advertised "stump grinding" which Brad was all over) and ran a skit that went through four games:
- Questions Only: Every line had to be a question. The volunteer first read off the wrong game, and blamed cold medicine for it. So Colin's excuse when flubbed a line: "I'm on cold medicine."
- One-Syllable Words: Self-explanatory, and harder than you'd think, especially when Brad asked Colin for a day of the week.
- If You Know What I Mean: Every line is a double entendre. Brad was a lot better at that game than Colin, but that probably means Brad has a dirtier mind. Ruth: "Hey, Colin is Canadian."
- Replace a Letter: Every occurrence of the letter S was replaced with the letter P. This was a lot funnier than it sounded because they went at rapid-fire speed and used the excuse to get away with a few things. You really wouldn't think hearing someone call someone an "apphole" would be so funny.
I don't remember whether or not they did this before or after the four-games-in-one, but they also did Sound Effects, where two audience members had to provide sound effects for their skit about spelunking dentists. The poor woman they picked just could not manage to imitate a sledgehammer, unfortunately. Not that I could have done any better.
Then there was intermission, which consisted of us sitting there and trying to catch our breath before they started up again.
They did another back-and-forth (each one supplying the next word of a sentence) using "dolphin chess" as the subject and then took questions from the audience. Someone asked "What do dolphins play for?" and after Brad and Colin got through the answer (which boiled down to "dolphins play for pride") someone from the audience shouted "Miami!" (So in the ending song, one of their lines was, "We hate that guy who said 'Miami' / For being funnier than us...")
But the last skit... oh, my God. They decided to play the Alphabet Game, in which each response begins with the next letter of the alphabet. (If Colin said a line beginning with C, Brad had to say a line beginning with D, and so on.) The topic was "penguin chasing." Standard game, but then they added several twists: They did it on stage barefoot, blindfolded...
...with 99 live mousetraps spread out all over the stage. (It was 100, but Colin set one off by accident.) They had crew hold up a rope a foot or so away from the edge of the stage to keep them from walking off it and out of range of the audience.
We didn't believe they were going to go through with it. We were wrong.
I lost count of how many times the mousetraps went off before it devolved into blindly throwing mousetraps at one another. (And one break in the actual lines when Colin yelled "Marco!" It reached the point where Brad was reluctant to say his next line and tip off Colin as to his whereabouts; Colin has pretty good aim while blindfolded - and three guesses where he aimed the mousetraps. Then when Brad shut up, Colin took the blindfold off.
I still cannot believe they did that. We speculated that they came up with the idea at 3 am while drunk and then Drew Carey got wind of it and dared them to do it. ...then again, I doubt they'd need to be dared. While I buy that it is all improvised, I'm pretty sure they had to rehearse the blindfolded-with-mousetraps part for safety's sake just so they could get an idea of how much space they had to work with. Which isn't cheating, it's just common sense.
Either way, we were absolutely on the floor. I went to the restroom before the show, thankfully, but didn't get anything to drink for fear I'd wet my pants laughing. I don't know how the Weinberg in Frederick, of all places, booked those guys, but I'm glad they did. That really was worth the fifty bucks.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 08:58 pm (UTC)OMG!
Date: 2007-10-22 08:58 pm (UTC)Glad you had a blast. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 09:44 pm (UTC)[/theater geek]
Also, you got to see them do a live show? How very awesome! I didn't even know they did a tour.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 06:17 pm (UTC)...on the upside, I got to wreak havok on a murder mystery train ride with Jack Sparrow, Cleopatra, a Gypsy, and a troop of girl scouts (gosh that sounds like a bar joke...), so I guess it all works out...
...right up to that part where the creativity demons present me with the idea of a murder mystery set aboard a murder mystery train/cruise...
no subject
Date: 2007-10-26 07:41 pm (UTC)I'm incredibly jealous. I routinely used to roll on the floor laughing my head off at those guys. Ryan Stiles and Wayne Brady were usually my favorites on the show. ^_^