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Improvisational comedy may not be for everyone, but to outright dismiss its validity as a form of entertainment is a faulty gesture at best and a flat-out insulting one at worst. This is especially the case when two seasoned improvisers who’d made names for themselves on a program as storied and as popular as “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” join forces to take their act to the masses independently of the brand that helped them jumpstart their showbiz careers. Take it from someone who’s had a copy of this show on DVD for several years now and who rarely, if ever, watches movies or even recorded stage plays more than once. This is one DVD that’s worth adding to one’s collection—especially if one happens to be a fan of improv.Now, granted, when it comes to the history of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”, no duo is more lauded in terms of wit and chemistry than regular cast members and real-life best friends Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles. However, Colin is hardly a stranger to working side-by-side with “Whose Line” semi-regular Brad Sherwood, as the two have often shared the stage as anchor and co-anchor in the game “Weird Newscasters,” participants in “Animals” and “If You Know What I Mean,” and co-hosts of three fictitious how-to programs in the game “New Choice” from “Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show,” just to name four instances. That in mind, when Mochrie and Sherwood teamed up to perform “An Evening with Colin and Brad” in 2002, I doubt that even they had any idea that their tour would intermittently last over two decades and, according to Krista D of The Prescott Times, hold the distinction of being one of the longest running comedy tours in history (“Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood Are Asking (Prescott) for Trouble”—April 25, 2024). That said, by the time the gents performed “Colin & Brad: Two Man Group” in 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Pabst Theater, they had surely gotten their chemistry down to a T and have learned to gel their respective comedy styles into one.Likewise, I advise anyone who might be under the impression that the live audience is riddled with “plants” to pay close attention to some of the games the chaps happen to play during this show. In “Moving Bodies,” for instance, audience members Joe and Amy act every bit as confused and out of sorts when moving Brad and Colin as most other audience members do on “Whose Line” when invited to participate in this game. Similarly, “Sound Effects” may feature Jeff, whose confidence shines through as he provides mostly solid sound effects for Colin during his fictitious white water rafting trip with Brad, but Brad pretty much denies himself such a luxury when he allows an entire section of the audience to provide his sound effects—including a woman who ends up giggling nervously before she can even begin to vocalize Brad glugging down his imaginary beer. Even Jennifer and Mike show their trepidation as “contestants” in “Jeopardy” when Jennifer accidentally honks her horn out of turn and Mike moves his lips while Brad first speaks for himself as the second contestant. Thankfully, Colin and Brad showcase just how skilled they are in reacting to participants with little to no improv experience or instinct in each of these games by throwing in lines, gestures, and plot points that make each scene flow smoothly as though they’d planned said skits all along to play out the way they do. To think, too, that this is a stage play the boys are putting on rather than a television episode where outtakes are far less likely, save for a brief intermission here or there at best in between games!One thing that I really appreciate about “Two Man Group” is the variety of games that Colin and Brad play, some of which “Whose Line” fans will instantly find familiar from various incarnations of the show and its offshoots (e.g., “Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza” and Great Britain’s “Fast and Loose”) while others derive their premises from such initial games and tweak certain aspects of them to be their own thing. “Moving Bodies,” for example, needs no explanation to long-time “Whose Line” aficionados, nor does “Sound Effects,” save for Brad, as mentioned earlier, recruiting an entire section of the audience to provide sound effects for him rather than a lone volunteer. “Sideways Scene” is likewise similar to its iteration from “Fast and Loose” and the CW run of “Whose Line,” save for there being no moderator calling for genre changes to the scene, while “[Improv] Jeopardy,” also as mentioned beforehand, involves two audience members playing contestants and selecting the categories of the answers from a stack of flash cards to which they must provide the question with Colin and Brad voicing their characters. Even the penultimate improv game of the evening, “The Torture Game,” starts off as a standard improvised scene that eventually evolves (or devolves, however one sees it) to follow the rules of three specific “Whose Line” improv games: “Questions Only,” “If You Know What I Mean,” and “Letter Substitution.”Then there’s “One Word Expert,” where Brad and Colin play the role of the “Love Doctor” and take turns speaking one word at a time as they answer questions from the audience regarding romantic relationships, and “[Interview] Interpreter,” where Colin acts as a translator for the hearing impaired (albeit in the loosest sense) while Brad interviews an audience member named Kevin about his job as a mall cop. Finally comes “Mouse Traps,” which Brad originally debuted on Showtime’s “Drew Carey’s Improv All-Stars” from January 27, 2001. However, rather than merely acting out a scene during which he and Colin must endure over two hundred live mousetraps set on the stage, he and Colin must also cope with twenty-one additional mousetraps hanging from strings at the levels of both men’s faces, stomachs, and groins while acting out an opera about one neighbor allegedly stealing the other’s mail. On top of that, each man must recite his line according to the rules of “The Alphabet Game,” where the players must recite their lines in alphabetical order according to the first word they utter starting with one letter (in Colin and Brad’s case, “Q”) all the way to “Z,” then back to “A” until all twenty-six letters have been accounted for. In short, the duo’s selection of games is a very eclectic one that proves to be both familiar and fresh with just enough energy to keep it lively without exhausting the viewer and just enough cheek and punch to illicit many a laugh without resorting to blatant crudeness.Finally, Mills Entertainment kindly treats owners of the DVD to two bonus features outside of the official show. In the first, Colin and Brad have a seat in front of the camera before their evening performance and offer their viewers a brief lesson on how to and how not to perform improv. Granted, it may only be just long enough to cover the basics of the art and as such is by no means as in-depth as, say, a certain improv seminar that Wayne Brady once conducted in the 2000s that’s available to watch on YouTube as of this review’s writing. Not only that, but Wayne and his cohosts had conducted that seminar in front of a live crowd who were blessed with the opportunity to perform some improv games with Wayne and his crew as well as with each other. Nevertheless, Colin and Brad’s lesson in all its show-and-tell glory at least gives a clear-enough idea of what can go wrong during an improv game, should the participants be out-of-synch with each other or, worse yet, if one member of the duo/troupe is actively trying to sabotage the performance. I must say, too, that I almost feel sorry for poor Colin as he puts up with the shamelessly unfiltered and smart-mouthed Brad during this session. I say “almost” only because during the other bonus feature, Colin holds his own in an interview that Brad hosts as a persona that he bases on the late James Lipton, and after Colin finishes answering Brad’s questions about his improv history and putting up with his alter ego’s smug, patronizing obsequiousness, he turns the table on Brad in an interview of his own and ends up leaving his buddy in the dark in more ways than one. All in all, it’s a nice way to show just how well the fellows keep their improv skills primed and play off each other even when they’re not on stage before dozens to hundreds of people.In summary, “Colin and Brad: Two Man Group” is a show that I would wholeheartedly recommend not only to improvisation fans, but also to people who want to understand what improv comedy is about and why it has as many supporters as it does. It’s a delightfully unpretentious artform that only the most shameless stage performers have the courage to engage in, and given the nature of television and film over the years throughout both media’s very existences, it can be a breath of fresh air for many a jaded consumer of performance art. It’s at its best, however, when one has seasoned, time-proven experts engaging in it and using their sharp wits and unwavering dedication to the scenes they’re acting out to tell their audiences stories and jokes that will have them breaking out in genuine laughter time and again. Thankfully, Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood prove to be just that in “Two Man Group,” and it’s performances such as this that make their audiences understand just why it is that their act has lasted as long as it has.