WHOSE LINE? COMES TO THE FORUM: TALKING IMPROV AND ART WITH BRAD SHERWOOD

When I was a little kid, my cousins and I would play the “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” games in my living room, speaking to each other in strange voices and laughing like weird animals, out of the insane thrill that we got from being goofy, having fun, and occasionally astonishing each other by fabricating another world where we could act any way we wanted.

November 5th, Brad Sherwood and Colin Mochrie, two stars of the long-running TV series, are performing their two-man improv show at the Forum Theatre. Below is just an excerpt of the conversation that Brad and I had on the ebb and flow of the battlefield of life and improv.

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TCC: Improv seems like a game of celebrating mental discomfort- the discomfort of not knowing what a teammate is about to say or do. I saw a clip from the show in which you and Colin, blindfolded and barefoot, role play on a stage covered with mouse traps: with mouse traps dangling at face, stomach, and genitals levels from the ceiling. How does that element of physical discomfort affect things? Does it make you feel sharper? Is it paralyzing at all?

BS: It's not paralyzing, and it certainly doesn't make us feel sharper. It just makes us more scared.

TCC: Haha!

BS: And I think being an improviser is about harnessing the fear of walking into the unknown in the first place. You literally walk on stage, an audience starts clapping, and you look at each other, basically saying, “We have no idea what’s gonna go on.” And as long as you can embrace that fear and make something fun out of it, then you’ve succeeded. And it goes counter to everything else that people do in life. Everybody else is doing sports, or art, or music, or whatever they do in life- by practice and repetition, so that they get good at doing the things they know to the point that they become excellent at it. And improv is counter to that, because you never wanna do the same thing twice. So you only get good at the reflex of coming up with stuff, but you have to make it different every time. So, imagine if you were a basketball player, and you practiced basketball your whole life; but your goal is, every time you make a shot, to release it from your wrist or your fingertips in a slightly different way every time. But you still wanna make a basket.

TCC: That's funny! That's a funny analogy. I like that.

BS: Great! I just made it up for you.

TCC: Well thank you, Brad. Um, that makes me want to ask you: for you personally, do you feel that improv and particularly that phenomenon that you were describing- of willingly and necessarily going into the unknown- is compartmentalized in your life? Or do you feel like that phenomenon and quality is shared in other areas of your life?

BS: Well, I think that phenomenon is in everyone's life. Because people say, “Well, how do you do that?” And I say, “We are improvising every single moment of the day.” Your responses to my answers are improvised. When you drive you're improvising- yes, you know you're gonna go from the end of this street to the other end of it, but all the way along there's things moving in front of you, making you stop. So you are in constant reaction-mode for every conversation you have, for everything you do. It's just that doing it in a show, you have to do all of that process while sort of creatively coming up with funny ideas as sort of writing notions on the spot, of things to say. But the process of improv is completely what human beings- well, all living creatures- do. Except for maybe ants that just follow the line of the chemical trail that someone else has left for them.

TCC: Yeah. You mention the ants, and I'm not trying to lob you- hopefully it's not a vapid philosophical question that I’m lobbing you, but- on the subject: Why do you think people get bored?

BS: Monotony, I think, leads to boredom in everything: in your relationships, in your work. When your brain is no longer feeling challenged and having surprises thrown at it- you know, that's kinda why people go on vacations, is to break up the monotony of what is their regular life: Going to work, driving the same road, basically doing the same tasks at work, possibly eating the same foods, you know, in a rotation, seven days a week. I think that's what creates boredom. And a lot of art is created out of the restlessness of trying to break free of that boredom, whether it’s comedy, or writing, or music, or what have you. And that's why new musical styles come alive and out of nowhere, or from adaptations of preexisting musics- because the people that are playing that music have become bored with just playing uh, blues, so jazz comes along. And so on.

TCC: Yeah. What you're saying makes me think of something that I was wondering about as I was formulating questions for you. I was reading what Colin Mochrie responded in an interview, and he said that listening very astutely, being a very good listener, is essential to being successful. So, I imagine it’s a lot of collaboration, it's about trying to be on the same page as people. But, by the same token, what about sabotage? Is there a place for mischievous sabotage in improv? I'm thinking of something like Andy Kaufman, like a fuck-with-and-confuse-everybody-else kind of thing.

BS: Absolutely. I mean, I think once you get good, and you're playing with people that you trust, and know can handle it. I've, in the past, made the analogy that doing an improv show on stage with someone is the equivalent of working together to make a sandcastle while you're having a snowball fight. You are creating together, but you're also trying to lay traps. When you're a good improviser, you want to put your other person into awkward, uncomfortable positions that might leave their butt hanging out in an embarrassing way, where they now have to solve this intellectual riddle to come up with something funny. So, you know, you're constantly kind of throwing the ball as hard as you can at the other guy.

TCC: How important is eye contact when you're doing improv? Are you ever looking deeply into one another's eyes and finding...

BS: Absolutely! Sometimes you'll find yourself staring right in at each other for, you know, for whatever reason, and uh, sort of hanging on every word that the other person is saying, and… you know there are moments when you're staring into each other's eyes, and some moment has just finished, and now you're kind of looking at each other like, “Now what?” Somebody has to say something. We've gotta come up with something! And then the eye contact gets broken, and somebody goes, "Let's ride the Pegasus to get to the train station!" or whatever. But more important than eye contact is listening. You kind have to hang on every word that your fellow improviser says, whether it's the tone of their voice, or some weird thing that they said, or their attitude, because each thing- each aspect of what it is that they say- might be what you grab to continue on with the scene. Like, if they said, "Very scared," you might go, "What're you afraid of?" And that's where the scene goes. Or they might have said it with an attitude, you know, you're like, “Why are you so stressed out today?” And that's where the scene goes. Every avenue is a possible way that the direction of the scene is going, 'cause there's no guarantees of where it's going to go. And because the audience is hearing the exact same information coming out of your performing partner's mouth at the same time that you are, the more you are using what they're saying, as opposed to writing something in your head, the more sense it will make to the audience that you're making it up. You know, if my partner says something fairly random, and I kind of ignore it and go, "I have an idea! Let's go on this bicycle to the bubble gum factory!" They think like, “Oh, he wasn't listening to his partner.” But if my partner says, “Ah, I think I was bitten by a tick!” I go, “Well, we better get that out before you get Lyme disease, quick! There might be some medicine that's next to the bubble gum factory, come on!” You know. Then it's organic, it came from somewhere.

TCC: What's your favorite thing about reality? Your experience of reality. Everything is a viable answer, from having a certain kind of sex, to, you know, that one kind of coffee you like a lot. Anything is viable.

BS: I think you just answered my question. I think what I like about reality, is that anything is viable. And that- it serves me well- that serves me well as an improviser, that anything is, in fact, viable. Whatever stupid idea pops into my brain when Colin asks me a question of how to solve something: I can grab an octopus, a popsicle stick, a bottle of nitroglycerin, and a map to Pluto, and that is viable. Or I can say “Well, let's just get in the car and go then.” That is also viable. You know. And that is sort of the true test of getting good as an improviser, is that everything that your partner throws at you, you have to make plausible and viable and over-accept, and go on that journey, even though a moment ago you were looking up in one direction saying, "Let's go towards the desert." And you turn around to Colin, and he did a fun thing, "We've got to go towards the waterfall!" And so you can't hold ideas of yours precious once something has gone off in a different direction. Throw them away and follow where the journey seems to be pointed.

TCC: That's mad cosmic, man.

BS: It's fun. It's fun to play with your brain in a way that's almost sort of stoner-like, but you're doing it as a performance and you're not stoned, so.

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Come into the cosmic fray with Colin and Brad on Thursday, November 5th, at the Forum Theatre: 236 Washington Street, Binghamton, NY. There’s no telling what you can expect, but it’s bound to be a riotous time for all.