WASHINGTON — He split our sides on TV’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?”
Now, improv king Colin Mochrie teams with the NSO Pops for “The Second City Guide to the Symphony,” blending orchestra with comedy for three shows Thursday-Saturday at Kennedy Center.
“It’s a chance to see the symphony in a different light,” Mochrie told WTOP.
Initially performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the Windy City’s renowned Second City comedians, the act now hits Kennedy Center as Steven Reineke conducts the NSO Pops from Mozart to Mahler to Glinka, while Mochrie emcees the various comedy routines in between.
“I’m the sex,” Mochrie joked. “I introduce scenes, I do a couple scenes, we do some improv. We do a scene where we make the entire audience do an orchestral piece. … You’re gonna see some great music, you’re going to see some very funny comedy, and at one point, everyone will be totally nude.”
Mochrie himself goes way back with Second City, starting with its Toronto troupe back in 1987.
“Shortly after Chicago Second City took off, they did one up in Toronto,” Mochrie said. “It’s where people like Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, basically the entire cast of ‘SCTV’ got started.”
Not only did Second City benefit Mochrie professionally, it also changed his personal life.
“Second City is very near and dear to my heart,” Mochrie said. “The woman who became my wife hired me for Second City. … I got my career there and I got a family, so it’s all worked out nicely.”
He says he met his wife Debra McGrath during the audition process.
“The audition process is quite grueling,” Mochrie recalled. “It takes like three hours, you start with like 50 people and they whittle it down to a small group. So after hours of auditions, she came up and said, ‘It was between you and the cute guy, and you got it.’ So based on that I immediately fell in love with her. About a year later, we started going out. Thank God the cute guy didn’t make it.”
In fact, Mochrie was working at Second City when producers of the British TV improv comedy show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” came to watch as part of their North American audition tour.
“They saw our show, liked the cast, then auditioned us the next day,” Mochrie said. “None of us got it, because we were doing that thing you’re supposed to do in improv where you’re very supportive and everyone works in an ensemble and makes the other person look good.”
He would get another chance the following year — and this time he was a tad more selfish.
“The next year, Deb and I had moved down to L.A. and they were going through auditioning again,” Mochrie said. “At that point, I didn’t know anyone I was auditioning with, so I was like, ‘Hey, screw you, look at me!’ And I got the part. A valuable lesson for the young people out there.”
The British “Whose Line?” aired on U.K.’s Channel 4 from 1988-1999, hosted by Clive Anderson.
“In Britain we had a little more leeway to be naughty, because there was no censorship,” Mochrie said. “Whereas in America, when it moved there, it was very odd the first couple of years because we had no idea where the line was. There were some things they’d censor that I thought were quite innocent, and then there were things they would let in that I thought, ‘I can’t believe that got by!'”
The hit American spinoff aired on ABC from 1999-2007, making household names of Mochrie, Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady and others, not to mention host Drew Carey (“The Drew Carey Show”).
“He’s the sweetest, most generous person I’ve ever met,” Mochrie said of Carey. “If you get to know a multimillionaire, make sure they’re really generous. He would take us out on trips with our families, the crew members, just these incredible trips on his own dime. He was very supportive of the show and it was basically his [fame] that got the show produced in America. I’m always thankful to him.”
While the show catapulted Carey to take over for Bob Barker on “The Price is Right,” it launched Brady to host the revival of “Let’s Make a Deal.” To this day, Mochrie is amazed at Brady’s uncanny ability to conjure up catchy song lyrics on the fly, weaving impromptu rhymes across music styles.
“He’s actually a Disney animatronic,” Mochrie joked. “There is no Wayne Brady. I probably am going to get in trouble for revealing this: He was made from spare parts of old ‘Hall of Presidents.'”
Still, the yin to Mochrie’s yang was always Stiles, forming a dynamic duo of improv comedy.
“We grew up together, so we had been improvising together for years,” Mochrie said. “[In our] early 20s, he was doing stand-up, I was doing improv, then a mutual friend got us together. His stand-up always contained a lot of improv because his stand-up wasn’t that good. It was all Dolly Parton jokes. So we started improvising together and pretty much from the first time, it was just magical.”
What made the “Colin and Ryan” magic work?
“He adores me [but] I don’t find him amusing at all, so I think that’s the secret to our success,” Mochrie joked. “It really helps that we have this great relationship on and off stage. When we’re improvising, I pretty much know where he’s going 90 percent of the time, and when I don’t, I trust him enough to just follow along and see what happens. So it’s nice to be able to have that kind of a relationship.”
Of all the improv games on the show — “Scenes from a Hat,” “Party Quirks,” “Props” — Mochrie most enjoyed “Greatest Hits,” where he and Stiles emceed fictional infomercials for CDs filled with crazy songs performed on the spot with impromptu lyrics across diverse genres by Brady and other comics.
“It was a chance for Ryan and I to sit down first, and just riff and goof around, then hand it over to these incredible singers who would knock it out of the park with these amazing songs,” Mochrie said. “It was my favorite because I got to be a participant and a viewer at the same time.”
Of course, not all of the games were his forte — particularly the Irish jig called “Hoedowns.”
“The songs are not my area,” Mochrie admitted. “I have charm and commitment, but that’s it.”
Celebrity guests were always hits, including comedy legends like Sid Caesar and Robin Williams.
“We were all very excited by [Robin], because he was an inspiration to all of us,” Mochrie said. “He was the improv master we all hoped to be. He was the nicest man, one of those who knew the crew’s names almost immediately. He was an Oscar winner and he was goofing around on the show with us.”
Still, the most famous remains the appearance by flamboyant fitness guru Richard Simmons.
As Mochrie and Stiles handled Brady and Simmons as human props, folding them into increasingly uncompromising positions, Carey can be see crying and convulsing from laughter behind the desk.
“The Richard Simmons sketch is the one that people [bring up],” Mochrie said. “If somebody doesn’t know ‘Whose Line is it Anyway,’ that’s the scene people will show them. I truly think it was one of the funniest scenes ever in the history of television. And God bless him. He was just so committed.”
Beyond the celebrity guests, it’s the deep bench of improv artists that continues to fuel the show.
“We’ve been really lucky with the cast,” Mochrie said. “Wayne, Ryan, Brad [Sherwood], Greg [Proops], Jeff Davis and Chip Esten, really a great bunch of people. I think that was also part of the allure of the show. Audiences could tell we got along and really enjoyed each other. I think that’s part of the reason the show is still going. We have such a short shooting schedule, like a couple weeks out of the year, that we don’t spend enough time with each other to get on each other’s nerves.”
The show most recently returned to TV with host Aisha Tyler in 2013, now airing on The C.W.
“We’re moving a little slower [these days],” Mochrie admitted. “I remember I was flipping through the television and ‘Whose Line?’ was on and I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t do that anymore! That physical thing, I cannot do!’ So we’ve been using our wily veteran skills to get around things like that.”
Unless you’re an animatronic like Brady.
“Wayne Brady is fine,” Mochrie joked.
When everything is made up, the points may not matter, but the belly laughs are as real as can be.
Click here for Kennedy Center ticket info. Listen to the full conversation with Colin Mochrie below:
