Cast: Greg Proops, Rory Bremner, Colin Mochrie, Ryan Stiles, and Clive Anderson

Clive's intro: "The comedy improvisation show that does for comedy." End of sentence. Excuse me, Clive, does what for comedy? We never found out. By the way, Greg sticks his tongue out at Clive. Why? I dunno.

Questions Only: just before a prison breakout; all four
Questions Only is one of those games that can be funny when it works well and when it works badly. If it works well, the questions come fast and furious. Each player topping the other; the questions flying so quickly, the audience hardly has time to react. When Questions Only works badly, the players' are easily stumped and quickly replaced; lasting for barely one round of questions. Then the joy comes from watching the players struggle to keep up. Tonight's game was definitely funny badly. Clive begins the game by rushing through the rules. I thought Comedy Central had just sped up the tape until Greg started laughing at him. The rules reading were a clue as to how the game would go. Or, I suppose, how the game wouldn't go. Greg and Colin started off. They got in about two rounds of questions when Colin asked Greg "What do you mean by that?" This type of question has frequently stumped Greg and he was out with an "I don't know." Ryan came in; Ryan and Colin got about two rounds again. Then Ryan asks Colin, "Aren't you in charge?" In this little tiny voice, like a child trying not to cry, Colin responds "no" and walks off. Rory comes on but is quickly thrown out. Colin comes back and responds to Ryan's question by pulling off his mask and asking "How did you know it was me in my disguise?" Surprised and not quite mentally quick enough to shift gears, Ryan comes back with "Nice mask" and walks off. Greg comes on and asks if Colin is the prison warden. Colin wants to know if he can escape with the other prisoners. So Greg wants to come with him to the warden's summer home. Colin: "The one in Miami." Colin tries it again as a question: "The one in Miami?" but Clive doesn't allow it. Rory asks Greg if he's the governor. Greg couldn't shift gears fast enough this time and walks off. Ryan asks Rory "Who's your favorite guard dog?" And Rory is stuck in second for an answer. Game ends. The game was like watching a car race where each car would start up and then stall out. So everyone would move forward a little and then shudder to halt; start up, move forward; and shutter to a halt again. And believe me, it was a lot funnier to watch than this paragraph makes it seem.

Film and Theater Styles: Ryan and Greg = high tech explorers on the edge of a volcano [styles: tourist information video; Dracula; Woody Allen; airline safety video]
Ryan and Greg are fun to watch in Film and Theater Styles but this wasn't one of their better games. I think the problem was in the subject and the styles more than with the guys though. The game devolved into a sequence of individual bits with each player handling a style by himself rather than a cohesive scene between two players. The scene started off well enough. Greg started with an opening line. Then Ryan went into one of his high tech sound effects. He started extending rods, pushing, and pulling. Greg caught on and said, "Good you've brought the" And then Ryan popped the contraption into his mouth and started smoking it. Greg freezes and looks at Ryan. Okay, so that wasn't where Greg was going. He switches gears and finishes his sentence with "cigarettetron." Clive buzzes in with the tourist information video style. Which Ryan bizarrely turns into an ad for the city Bath. "Clean like its name." In comes the Dracula style. Both guys are looking at each other wondering which one will go for Dracula. Greg grabs a beetle and eats it. I don't think vampires eat beetles, do they? But Ryan gave him the Dracula role anyway. Ryan looks into the volcano and announces "I notice in the reflection of the lava that you have no reflection." Uh, Ryan? The reflection of the lava????? So that's like a reflection of a reflection of a reflection? Right? I guess there must have been an infinity mirror somewhere lying around. Regardless, Greg went to bite Ryan on the neck as any good vampire should. Only Greg's a little too short to go biting Ryan's neck. So he's hopping up and down trying to get somewhere near Ryan's neck in order to bite it. While Ryan is pretending to have been bitten. The whole thing ended up more like the Leslie Nielson Dracula spoof rather than pure Dracula. Even after Clive had buzzed in, Greg was still jumping and Clive had to tell him to hold still. The next style, Woody Allen, saw a vintage Greg impersonation. What I noticed most about Greg's impersonation was how much the professional impersonator, Rory, appreciated it. He was smiling and nodding in the background. After Greg finished, Clive buzzed in with the final style (airplane safety video) which Ryan handled by mentioning the two exits in the front and rear if the volcano exploded. I'm inclined with Clive's assessment after the game. "Perversely, Colin wins that and he wasn't even in it." Ryan patted Colin on the shoulder after Colin won the game.

News Report: The Princess and the Frog; Greg = anchor; Colin = expert; Rory = interviewer; Ryan = frog breeder and princess
Greg started out the news report in his usual high class fashion by licking and kissing Colin's hand and then announcing his name — Salty Basket. Greg turned the game over to Colin, but playing the expert has never been one of Colin's specialties and he stumbled a bit through his sequence. Rory played a good interviewer introducing the frog breeder, Henry Sessoms. Ryan ended his frog breeder sequence with a joke about how this frog was different. Most frogs when kissed by a princess turn into a prince. But this frog turned into the frog Formerly Known As Prince. Ryan was facing Greg and Colin when he said that line. I wish we could have seen Greg and Colin's reaction because whatever they did, Ryan found funny. And he had to do the suck the lime routine to keep from laughing at them. Greg came back on saying to Colin that kissing a frog has got to be a hassle. When Colin replied, he mentioned that the princess had started with hedgehogs before frogs. There seemed to be an edit cut there, but I'm not sure. The dialog jumps a little; Colin's words don't seem related to Greg's question. When Greg threw it the report back to the field, Rory asked Ryan, the princess, if he could call her Diana, Ryan agreed, but didn't really follow up with a Diana impersonation. Ryan did end his spiel with a painful pun about how this frog was the first one that worked for her. "All the rest croaked."

Picture: all four
The cut game. I never found a description of what the picture looked like. I've read that there were some good jokes especially by Rory during this game. But since, picture ranks fairly low on my list of favorite games, I consider this an acceptable game to cut if Comedy Central absolutely must cut a game.

Props: Greg and Rory = 2 giant cardboard children-designed flowers; Ryan and Colin = 2 bumpy yellow swim caps
The jokes here were pretty standard. Ryan and Colin turned their swim caps into swim caps and became synchronized swimmers. Greg and Rory turned their large flowers into Ascot hats. The bumpy swim caps became a fly's eyes. The flowers became spaceships. Later on, Greg turned the flowers into Insectitroid eyes and asked if Rory had seen the other space ships. Pretty standard fare.

Newsflash: a penguin colony; Ryan and Colin = studio anchors; Greg = field reporter
This was the first time I've seen Greg try to guess the green screen. He started by talking about all the excitement going on behind him. Naturally, there were two lonely penguins surfing the frozen wasteland. In fact, every time, Greg mentioned excitement or noise or crowds, the scene was calm, quiet, and desolate. If the game had been scripted that way, it would have seemed hokey because the contrast between comment and reality happened so often. Ryan and Colin fed Greg some good clues. Unfortunately, Greg misinterpreted them. Greg had made a comment about how things were really jumping and that his heart was pounding. So Ryan said that was a good thing because it was helping the temperature. Of course, Ryan meant that it was helping Greg stay warm, but Greg took it to mean that he was in a hot surrounding. The guys finally got Greg on track when Ryan asked if Greg would look more in place if he'd worn a tux. Greg was like "Really??? Oh!!" If you've seen the Let's Make a Date where Greg tried to guess that Tony was Noddy, that's the look on Greg's face and the sound of his voice as he finally and correctly guessed that he was at a penguin rookery.

Sit, Stand, Bend: wild west saloon; Ryan, Colin, and Greg
This was a slightly surprising Sit, Stand, Bend to me. Colin has never been particularly strong at Sit, Stand, Bend. He tends to be the third player in the position shifts, scrambling to find an acceptable position. But he commanded this game almost as much as Ryan did leaving Greg to do most of the scrambling this time. Ryan started the scene sitting. And since he was sitting in a wild west saloon, Ryan started playing the piano. That stool became the piano stool several times throughout the game with both Ryan and Greg using it to play the piano and sing (badly). Colin adopted the role as the evil gunslinger, Black Bob Boomby. I guess having a defined role gave Colin the confidence to challenge Ryan for control of the game this time. I'm not sure what role Greg was playing. At one point, Greg and Colin almost got into a gunfight so I guess Greg was the sheriff. It was a fun game to watch. Have you noticed that Sit, Stand, Bend and Sit, Stand, Lie always seem to speed up as the game goes on? (No significance to the question, I just thought I'd ask it.)

Superheroes: shortage of paint; Greg = Impotence Boy; Ryan = Huge Gesture Boy; Colin = Cramp Boy; Rory = Scottish Weatherman
As Clive was taking suggestions, one audience member yelled out Impotence Boy. Greg froze. Clive announced that Greg had placed one of his close personal friends in the audience to make that suggestion to which Greg looked in the audience and asked, "Uncle Bill?" Oddly enough, Greg then turned to Clive and in all honesty said, "THAT is weird!" And Clive agreed. It was as if, for a moment, the two had forgotten they were being filmed. When Clive asked for the crisis, an audience member cried, "shortage of paint". Clive looked at the person who yelled it and flatly told him, "You're strange." It was a different reaction than we normally get from Clive. Greg started the impotence jokes by saying that he thought he almost achieved one. But it was Ryan who really got the jokes going by announcing "Sorry, I'm late. I didn't think I'd be able to come, but I suppose you know all about that." Colin jumped on the bandwagon too. "I was having sex constant..... oh, sorry." Rory was the only one who didn't make a joke at Greg's expense. In fact, Rory didn't do much of anything except come on in glasses that he hadn't worn previously during the episode. (They weren't prop glasses because I've seen Rory wear glasses on an earlier episode.) Except for the impotence jokes, the game wasn't outstanding. Although watching Colin's body cramp up was fun to watch. (I'm not really the sick person that last sentence makes me sound. Honest.)

Animals: trouble at home; Ryan = tomcat; Greg and Colin = female cats
Greg and Colin start off grooming themselves very cat-like when Greg hacks up a fur ball. Ryan slithers in and sprays Colin. Greg starts to get jealous because Colin was taking all of Ryan's spray. Since Colin didn't want to be sprayed, it was ironic that Greg was jealous. Ryan's tomcat was full of struttin' ego. "Hey, there's enough of me for everyone! Spray for all of you!" At one point, both Colin and Greg were rubbing up against Ryan who finally picked Greg. As Greg was showing off for Ryan, he jumped up onto the Party Quirks step and then jumped down. Greg's landing wasn't quite as graceful as his real-life animal inspiration though, and he nearly fell down. Rejected, Colin decided to play with a mouse. Ryan decided to get rid of Colin all together and pulled out his "secret weapon" — a Walkman with a tape of dog sounds. (It's amazing what WLiiA animals own, isn't it?) But Colin pulled out HIS secret weapon and pulled off his mask revealing that he was actually a dog! A nice end to an amusing game.

Hats: dating agency video; all four
Another game that felt standard to me. I remember that Ryan and Colin's box had a very large woven coolie hat which fell off the top while Ryan was carrying it across the stage. So he started kicking it across. One time, Ryan had a monocle and was holding lots of glasses. He struggled through his accent and his joke — the punchline was about making a spectacle of himself but watching him struggle was more amusing. Greg had the funniest lines. I just wish I could remember them. Sorry.

Credits: Ryan and Greg = super studs bragging about their conquests
Often when Clive announces Ryan the winner, Ryan seems totally unthrilled about winning, and this was no exception. But for some reason, Colin was positively delighted that Ryan won — laughing and widely grinning. But not delighted in a "good for you" sort of way. More like an imp who's seen a dream come true. I'd have liked to known what preceded that sequence. Ryan and Greg actually played this better than their Film and Theater Styles scene, I thought. Greg started by mentioning a name. Ryan cut in with "Had him." Greg mentions another name. Ryan's in again with "Had him." So Greg comes back with "Which way?" Most of the name readings went on like that. Anna Marie Thoroughgood — "And she is thoroughly good". Dan Patterson can really produce.

Best Game:
Can I have a three-way tie? I'm having a hard time choosing between Questions Only, Superheroes, and Animals mostly because no game really stands out as wonderful.

Overall Comments:
This was one of those episodes that struck me as being slightly off-kilter. Nothing was quite right, but nothing was really wrong either. The whole show just felt slanted somehow. It wasn't extraordinarily funny, but nothing was painful to watch either. It was definitely a Greg show, that much I do know. Except for Sit, Stand, Bend and Questions Only, Greg commanded every game I saw. Ryan and Colin offered some good support for Greg. As for Rory, well, he's been funnier and has contributed more. I guess this night just wasn't his night.

© LKK 10/08/00