BY KAREN BOSSICK

If you loved “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” you will adore Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood in the Scared Scriptless Tour.

So says Brad Sherwood who will bring the show to the Argyros Performing Arts Center along with Colin Mochrie on Saturday, Nov. 30.

“It’s more audience participatory than the TV show. So, if they loved the TV show, they will really love this,” he said.

Indeed, the PG-rated show is completely improvised—Sherwood and Mochrie give almost complete control to the audience. But, don’t worry, they grab only volunteers—they never make anyone come on stage who isn’t a willing participant.

So, if you just want to sit back and laugh, you can.

“It’s always exciting because we never know what’s going to happen in the show,” said Sherwood. “We love giving control of so much of the show to the audience and having them put us in situations that we have to figure our way out of. There’s nothing planned and we are at the mercy of the audience so it’s exciting for the audience to see how we handle ourselves.”

The two draw on improv games that you might have seen on “Whose Line,” such as “One Word Expert,” people doing sound effects and people moving Sherwood and Mochrie into strange positions. But the two are always developing new games and ways to involve the audience, as well.

There will be no Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi jokes.

“We tell the audience that it’s a political free zone, that everybody comes here to get away from that for two hours. And the audience seems to be appreciate that they don’t have to be subjected to whatever our political views are because half of them will find them funny and half of them won’t,” Sherwood.

Comedy is in Sherwood’s DNA—he comes from a long line of family members who aspired to ridiculousness to elicit laughs.

“My grandfather, my father, my uncles were all very funny so I naturally gravitated towards wanting to emulate them,” Sherwood said. “My grandfather would drive down the road and wave to someone on the side of the road and there ‘d be no one there—he just wanted to crack me up. And I thought it was the funniest thing.”

Sherwood, a former “Dating Game” host, used his sense of humor to make new friends during his family’s frequent moves.

“So, I think I was kind of improvising even when I was a kid—I just didn’t know what it was. I’d be hanging out with my friends and trying to say funny things based on what was happening at the moment. Something funny happened I would expand on it and try to make it even funnier,” he said.

“I took an improv workshop in California when I was in my 20sand thought, ‘Wow, this is what I was meant to do!’ I started doing it and never stopped. It’s the way my brain works—I have a compulsion to make people laugh and so it’s an art form that I’ve crafted.”

Sherwood and Mochrie hit it off when they took part in the British version of “Whose Line.” When that ended, they joined the American version hosted by Drew Carey, appearing on every episode from its debut in 1998 to its finale in 2006.

“The British are a little more conservative with what makes them laugh. They liked to make fun of literary references. And most of them were stand-up comedians so they weren’t as likely to want to jump out there and look ridiculous.  But we were all a bunch of pretty goofy Canadians and Americans who were more willing to be silly and so the show evolved from being a little more rigid and constrained into a more goofy character-driven show,” Sherwood said

The Scottish-born Mochrie, in fact, wanted to be a marine biologist until he played an undertaker in a school play of “The Death and life of Sneaky Fitch.” He was hooked with the first laugh and has gone on to play such memorable characters as the Nabisco Snack Fairy and an exaggerated neurotic caffeine-fueled version of Mike Brady on a musical version of “The Brady Bunch.”

Comedy has taken the two places they never imagined, Sherwood said. They’ve hosted the Press Correspondents’ Dinner with the President—one which featured Karl Rove as a rapping White House Chief of Staff.

And a year ago this month they performed at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, following it up with a performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

“So, we got to go to a couple big places that I always thought—Wow!—you’ll never play there,” said Sherwood.

IF YOU GO:

Brad Sherwood and Colin Mochrie will perform “Scared Scriptless” at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 30, at the Argyros Performing Arts center in Ketchum.

Tickets are $60, available at www.theargyros.org or at 208-726-7872.