Even the greats have an off day sometimes. NBA legend Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots in his career. During his storied NHL tenure, Wayne Gretzky lost a total of 593 regular season games.
If improvisational comedy counts as a sport (and there’s a case to be made that it should), Colin Mochrie is arguably its Jordan or Gretzky. And like those iconic athletes, he sometimes lays a brick or fans on the puck.
Consider Mochrie’s 1991 debut on the original British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on BBC. He had auditioned for the program several years earlier but failed to make the cut. In the third season, he was finally given his chance, and he blew it.
“I just psyched myself out,” Mochrie says, from his home in Toronto. “For some reason I thought, ‘Oh sure, we speak the same language, but will they understand my humour or references?’ So the things that got me the job, I didn’t do. I was just very tentative. So yeah, I learned my lesson.”
Mochrie might have taken some advice from another sports legend, Hank Aaron, who once said, “My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having troubles off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”
Mochrie did keep swinging, although at the time he didn’t see much chance of hitting a home run. “On my first show, I sucked,” he says, “so I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ll never be part of that again.’ I was just lucky that my good friend Ryan Stiles had become part of that group and he talked them into giving me another chance, so it worked out from there.”
It worked out so well, in fact, that Mochrie became a regular on the series, appearing in 71 episodes—a record bested only by his fellow Canadian Stiles, who racked up a total of 92. Mochrie figures the show kept them around to ensure that an excess of dry British wit didn’t make Whose Line too highbrow for its own good. “I think the producers wanted some dumber North Americans just to do the goofy stuff,” he says. “Instead of, you know, doing riffs on Ulysses, we’d pretend we were chickens.”
When ABC launched an American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? in 1998, it recruited both Canadian funnymen, and the show’s long tenure made them household names, along with co-stars including Wayne Brady, Greg Proops, and Brad Sherwood—well, they’re all household names in the types of households that revere lightning-quick thinking and absurdist comedy, at any rate.
Related stories
- How Roxanne Altered the Course of Steve Martin’s Career and Filmmaking in B.C.
- The Surprising and Stressful World of Simulation Acting
- Vancouver Musician bbno$ Is Full of Gratitude and Excitement as His Star Rises
Mochrie cut his comedic teeth as a member of the Vancouver TheatreSports League (now known as The Improv Centre) for the first half of the 1980s. It was when he was a student in Langara College’s Studio 58 theatre program, however, that he saw improv in action for the first time.
“A friend was doing a play reading,” he recalls. “Part of the evening—because I think it was a one-act and they wanted to make more of the event—was this new thing called theatresports, which had been invented by Keith Johnstone in Calgary. I saw it, and it was all people I knew. I thought, ‘This looks like it’d be a lot of fun.’ Just watching them get suggestions and making scenes out of nothing but that suggestion, I thought, was great. And it was a couple of months later that the TheatreSports League started up.
“I wasn’t there right at the beginning, but I’d say in about a year I’d joined and thought it was the best thing in the world,” Mochrie continues. “But I never thought, ‘This is going to be a career.’ Because nobody really knew what improv was. Within a year of TheatreSports, it became the big thing, with lineups around the block, and it afforded us the chance to do our own productions. But still, in the public consciousness, it was not a thing.”
According to Mochrie, it was the U.S. version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? that finally cemented improv comedy’s place in the entertainment world. Hosted by Drew Carey, the program aired first on ABC from 1998 to 2007.
Mochrie quickly learned that American network television is somewhat more conservative than Britain’s Channel 4. “People were doing unspeakable things to the Queen, and there were F-bombs,” he recalls of the original run of the show across the pond. “It was a bit of an adjustment coming to America, because we didn’t know where the line was. I did a scene where I killed three women. Nothing. The next scene, I kissed Greg Proops, and the censor who was in the booth stopped the show. He said, ‘Do something else.’”
That sort of on-the-spot censorship didn’t sit well with Carey, who was also the show’s co-creator and executive producer. Mochrie says Carey would often respond by intentionally peppering his commentary with curse words that he knew would get the ABC censors worked up. Fortunately for all parties, there was a better way—one that didn’t involve interrupting the flow of the performers’ improvisations.
“They came to sort of an agreement that we would do the show, and then afterwards the producer and the censor would get together and they would sort of fight over what would stay in and what would go,” Mochrie says.
After a years-long hiatus, the CW revived Whose Line in 2013, with Aisha Tyler taking over hosting duties. Mochrie says this move caused him yet another bit of culture shock, this time a matter of budget rather than censorship. “I remember when we came back on the CW, one of the first things they said was ‘You have to supply your own clothes.’ You know what? I just saw an episode of Arrow where a helicopter crashed into a bridge. How can you afford that, and I can’t get a shirt?”
The final episode of the American Whose Line aired on November 1, 2024, but Mochrie admits that he “would never say never” if there were talk of another revival—maybe with a decent budget this time.
“I can’t be bitter about it, because it did run for so long,” he says. “Luckily, kids who weren’t born during the Drew years found it on YouTube, and it gave us a second life with our touring,” he says, referring to the live version of the show, Whose Live Anyway? “And that’s what brought it back to the CW. So who knows? Maybe once the next generation catches on, on either TikTok or YouTube, we’ll bring it back.”
In the meantime, Mochrie has plenty to keep him occupied. This fall, for instance, he’ll be on tour with Sherwood and performing shows alongside hypnotist Asad Mecci. Before that, he’ll find himself back in Vancouver for two shows at the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Stanley Stage on August 8 and 9. Mochrie and the Arts Club go way back. He appeared in its mid-1980s productions of She Stoops to Conquer and Taking Steps.
No matter where his career takes him, it seems inevitable that Mochrie will continue to be best known as that guy from Whose Line Is It Anyway? And that’s just fine by him.
“That show afforded all of us the chance to be able to make this our career,” he says. “Every day I think to myself how lucky I am that a show from Britain came out of nowhere and showcased truly the only thing I do well. It really worked out for me.”
Read more arts stories.
