Really, there’s a good reason why Brooke McEldowney’s 9 Chickweed Lane won the National Cartoonist Society’s Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip this year. The man is wicked smart.
Because, I mean, Colin Mochrie. It takes no genius to recognize that Colin Mochrie is something special; even albinoblacksheep.com knows that. Without Colin Mochrie, both the American and British versions of Whose Line Is It Anyway might have failed utterly. Colin is not the funniest man on the show, nor the flashiest, nor the naughtiest, but he is the kind of comic who is absolutely essential to improv: the team player who knows when to back off, and can get the other players working better with each other. He is the “Yes And” Man. Without him, Tony Slattery and Ryan Stiles sometimes looked as if they might have chewed each other up along with the scenery.
And Colin’s career beyond Whose Line has colored him with a bit of the grand cosmic joke. The man is most often seen these days on commercials and in character roles on sitcoms, just another bald head and silly mug to serve as grist for the advertising mill. Despite his very palpable acting smarts, Hollywood still hasn’t given Colin Mochrie a good firm shake.
So who better to be Mega-God, if you have as many questions about the reasonableness and existence of an all-powerful deity as McEldowney does? Mochrie is an intentional and unintentional joker. That about sums it up.
Not to mention that McEldowney’s summer project seems to have been a graphic novel version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as performed by supernaturals in a 1920s setting.
Colin Mochrie and Bruce McEldowney: two great tastes what taste great together.
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