“COLIN MOCHERIE & BRAD SHERWOOD: THE THIRD FAREWELL TOUR”

 What: Improv by two stars of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts, 190 S. Cascade Ave.

Tickets: $29.50-$44.50; 520-7469, 1-866-464-2626, ticketswest.com and TicketsWest outlets.

It’s painful to watch, really. Two men on a stage with more than 100 primed rodent traps. Did I mention they’re blindfolded, barefoot and wearing tuxedoes?

“Rat traps,” Brad Sherwood informs the audience. Then he removes a large zucchini from his pants and demonstrates how it neatly slices the vegetable in half.

The audience “ooohs” trepidatiously. Sherwood nods, completely deadpan.

Sherwood and Colin Mochrie (”From ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’” their touring posters say) call it the mousetrap game, and they’ll be doing a version of it  when they play the Pikes Peak Center on Sunday. 

“Of our games, it’s probably the least improv game, Sherwood says from his home in Los Angeles. He and Mochrie reserve touring for the weekends. They’ve been performing together for about 19 years now, six as a touring team. “The audience just loves it. They love seeing the pain. There’s an innate cruelty to comedy, from the early days of slapstick, and that’s where this comes from.”

Like all improv, they work with no script, only a set list of games and audience suggestions.

“The difference between improv and stand-up, for the audience, is they are there for the moment of creation,” he says. “They weren’t there for the stand-up comedian, when he wrote his act and took it to clubs and perfected it word by word, beat by beat. We’re making them laugh and doing a magic act at the same time.”

Question: You’ve been working together for a long time. Tell me how touring with Colin came about.

Answer: We both came from a live comedy background - Second City, Theatresports and lots of live improv. During the show, we’d gone out with some of the cast member done big cast show. We wanted to go out more. When you’re onstage with 10 people, you sort of end up sitting around waiting until it’s your turn.

Q: What’s it like to work with Colin at this point? Easy?

A: As much as I like to make fun of Colin, we travel well together and I think our styles are very complimentary. It’s very lucky that we work well together. Quite honestly, we have not had an argument in the last six years. He’s completely low maintenance and I’m high functioning: I handle all the hassles while we’re on the road, and he kind of rolls with it.

Q: About performing without a script: Do you feel fearless at this point, or were you always that way?

A: I think we’ve always felt fearless. It’s a giggle to go out there and you don’t know what to do. It’s the action sport of performing to only go out there with what games you’re going to play but no idea what the content is going to be.

Q: Improv always seems like a small-venue thing to me, but you’ve played some pretty big halls. Does it work differently there?

A: I think every audience is a big audience. Seriously. In a room with 50 people and only 50 seats, it feels like the same energy as 300 in 300 seats - or 1,000. There’s something about a packed room. You work off it, and the audience feeds off your own excitement.

And we bring people out of the audience for most of the games, so there’s usually a live human being on stage trying to mess with us for most of the show.

Q: Are there any new situations for you anymore?

A: No, that’s the thing. We’re always changing the way we ask for things. We’re getting suggestions in different ways. We constantly want to push ourself as improv purists to be out of the rut and do it differently.

That’s the thing with playing in a band or being in a play or doing stand-up. They do the exact same act every single night. We may be playing the same games, but the context and the joke is never done the same way twice.

Q: So I have to ask the flip side of that question: Are there places that you have to stop yourself from going?

A: I don’t think you ever stop yourself from going somewhere. You make a mental note that you’re on a familiar path and you veer off and drive through the woods. We’re always in control - in an out-of-control way. We control the destiny of where the scene is going. If it feels too familiar, we change it up.

That’s the coolest part of our job. It doesn’t get mundane. We can’t rest on our laurels and say ‘oh, it’s another show.’ We’re always in survival mode when we’re on stage.

Q: “Whose Line” made improv a pretty mainstream notion. Does that make it easier or harder for you?

A: I think it makes it easier on the level that people tend to have a greater awareness of it and people come to the show. A crowd makes it easier. Although there are people who think we must be taking a short cut and there are tricks that we have. People are always looking for the trap door. In some ways, that’s a great compliment. On the other hand, they think we’re liars. We’re either frauds or big geniuses.

Q: What are some of strangest things that audience members has thrown at you.

A: It’s hard to remember anything terribly strange. Technically, we’re looking the strange; we’re looking for the bizarre; we’re wanting to hear the thing that haven’t heard before. We’re constantly trying to think of ways to solicit things we have never heard of before. Not a joke, but, say, an occupation we’ve never heard of.

Really, everything we do is strange to a certain extent. In improv you’re literally launching yourself into the unknown. Every moment is about the discovery of what do I do with this and what’s about to happen?

Q: Any good stories about times it just didn’t work?

A: No, we’re pretty lucky. We’ve done a few corporate gigs, playing some banquet room on a riser. That’s the journeyman path. We’re like the comedy “MacGyver:” We take what they give us or don’t give us. 

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Contact the writer at 476-1602.

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