Laugh out loud with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood,the funnymen from the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Over the telephone,the voice has a Scottish lilt and no trace of humour. No whacky one-liners come forth,no multiple accents that cracked up listeners and made Colin Mochrie a hit in the 1990s TV show Whose Line Is it Anyway? Instead,Mochrie comes across as shy,almost reclusive. This is how I sound when I am not performing. I try not to use different voices when I am speaking with people off-stage. I dont want to end up confusing them, he says. Mochrie,a balding Scottish Canadian,is visiting India with fellow performer Brad Sherwood as part of the Black Dog Comedy Evenings,a five-city tour of India which concluded with a performance on Sunday. I like to keep to myself in real life. It is only on stage that I feel I have entered a different world because I am in the company of fellow performers and a crowd which will laugh at my jokes, he says in a serious tone. On stage,Mochrie morphs into a goofy guy while Sherwood doles out most of the one-liners and rhymes up funny songs. We manage to balance our strengths, says Sherwood. The humour is irreverent and one of their performances in Whose Line. had Mochrie parodying the film Titanic by singing, Corpses bobbing in the sea,la la la,la la la lee lee lee! Sherwood adds that a friendship of 20 years has created a high comfort level between them. I dont stay away from making personal jokes at Mochrie because he is a Scotsman, says Sherwood. After the series ended on ABC channel in the US (it is currently being telecast by Star World in India),more than a decade ago,Sherwood and Mochrie teamed up in 2003 to perform live,their show being called An Evening with Colin and Brad. We were a tad nervous about coming to India. But the audience has been supportive and has moved with the pace of the acts, says Mochrie,about the recent performances in Hyderabad,Kolkata,Bangalore and Mumbai. He adds that he makes no digs at India or Indians. At the Delhi show,the duo performed segments like Sound Effects where the audience makes certain noises to which the duo responds Moving Bodies where the performers freeze themselves into puppet forms and an audience member can moves them into funny postures. But we dont do Hoedown (a musical performance) or Props (getting creative with a variety of items) on our shows, adds Sherwood. Mochrie adds that humour comes easily to him,though he has been shy since childhood. I first watched a comedy performance in school and thought that this was something I could do too. Soon,I started to do stand-up comedy and decided to make a career out of it, he says. He was rejected twice for Whose Line. before finally pairing up with another stand-up comedian Ryan Stiles. Stiles and Mochrie were an instant hit,and are considered the reason Whose Line . became popular. A few seasons later,however,Mochrie paired with Sherwood,starting a friendship thats still going strong.
