I hung out with hardcore (meaning, multiple Second City workshops/three times a week pub gigs/iO) improv nerds for years, and they all liked Whose Line Is It, Anyway? So did I. Lots of laugh ’til you cry moments.
Maybe Canadian improv nerds are less — I dunno — bitchy, but this guy at SplitSider is not impressed:
Drew Carey, passable standup comic and guy every longform improv (read: UCB, Second City, iO) nerd likes to shit on for popularizing short form improv with Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is not going to be making any new friends with improv purists.
His new show on the Game Show Network, entitled Drew Carey’s Improv-a-Ganza (yep) seems inoffensive and ignorable enough as-is. I mean, it’s on the Game Show Network. But then Charlie Sheen decided to join him, and it is all just too much…
Again, over the years, I never heard anybody say this stuff. Carey isn’t a master improviser himself, but he was a great host, and that was his main role. I was never a rabid fangirl of the show, however (that stuff got pretty weird online — don’t know if some of those sites are still up, but wow…) I can be as much as a purity bore/”hey, don’t touch MY stuff, you poseurs” bitch about things I’m into than the next person, but I’m just sayin’, is all.
I think we get the Game Show Network up here, but I don’t know how any of this stuff works anymore. Lisa Lampenelli’s new special was supposed to be on Comedy Central a few Sundays ago, and nada.
