Improv guy opines on standup

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 21st, 2005

Colin Mochrie, in a Toledo Blade profile:

“I think standup is a thousand times harder than improv,” he says in a telephone interview from his home in Toronto. “With standup, you have to come up with your own material, you do it in front of an audience, and the audience knows you’ve written it, and that you think it’s funny, so there’s sort of a judgment thing there.

“When you’re doing improv, the audience is such a major part of the show, they know that you’re making it up as you go, they know you’re working on their suggestions, so you have a little more leeway.”

Mochrie (Whose Line is it Anyway?), who says he wouldn’t do standup if you paid him, contradicts the Blade’s Mike Kelly’s theory, which he lays out in his lede. Kelly says “many standup comedians wouldn’t be caught dead doing improv on stage.” Furthermore, says Kelly:

It’s just not that easy coming up with funny material on the spur of the moment, based on little more than a suggestion hollered out by somebody sitting out there in the darkness who may or may not be in full command of his faculties.

Of course, each side does a bit of each– Standup comics often improvise after “suggestions” from “somebody sitting out there in the darkness.” They’re called hecklers, or, more charitably, over-enthusiastic crowd members. Sometimes they “make suggestions” with malice and/or alcohol, and just as often not. In any event, we improvise frequently. (And some of us even seek it out by “working the crowd.”) Now, if we could only get the improv folks to admit that not everything is off the cuff.

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