John Lucas

I recently interviewed Canadian improv-comedy great Colin Mochrie, of Whose Line Is It Anyway? fame, for Montecristo magazine’s website.

I asked Mochrie about his debut appearance on the original British version of the show. Here’s what he had to say:

“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.”

Read the rest of my interview with Colin Mochrie over at the Montecristo site.

Incidentally, this was my first Montecristo article, but I really enjoyed writing it and hope to do more in the future.