COLIN MOCHRIE AND BRAD SHERWOOD, Abravanel Hall, Saturday

Just how sadistic can audiences be?

Improvisational comics Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood, best known for the TV show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" performed in Abravanel Hall Saturday night, and the audience laughed long and loud during the mousetrap skit.

The two comedians had to walk among 100 set mousetraps, blindfolded, while singing out a series of sentences opera-style. Each time a trap would snap — on the toes and feet of the two — the audience would roar with delight.

And as the skit progressed, Sherwood began throwing mousetraps in Mochrie's general direction. But Mochrie got the final laugh when he took off his blindfold and threw a bunch of traps at Sherwood in close range.

Of course, pain wasn't the only laugh-getter. The two also brought back a few featured skits from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

The "Sound Effects" bit had the duo calling two members of the audience up on the stage to provide sound effects noises to their actions. Mochrie and Sherwood were suppose to be ankle doctors going on a fishing trip with their friends. The two sound-effects people had to sound like a motor boat, an anchor, a fishing reel and a bull horn.

The biggest laugh, however, came when one of them had to sound like country singer Shania Twain.

"I can't sing!" she protested. Which, of course, drew a huge amount of laughter from the audience.

Another "Whose Line" skit was "Moving Bodies." During this piece, two more members of the audience were called onto the stage, and they had to move Mochrie and Sherwood's arms, hands, legs and heads while they portrayed Irish movers packing up a friend's house on a scooter.

Even children were picked to be part of the act. In "Horns," three children were called onto the stage and given bicycle horns. Their role was to honk the horns while Sherwood and Mochrie were saying lines. At each honk, the two had to say a totally different line as they discussed dancing and cleaning ducts.

At the beginning of this side-splitting show, Sherwood passed out pencils and paper and had some audience members write out a line of dialogue. During the second half of the show, Mochrie collected the papers, and the two performed a skit about a sheriff and his deputy waiting for a cowboy gang by using quotes from those papers.

And during another skit, Sherwood played a police interrogator forcing a confession from Mochrie, a criminal who "wore galoshes, a scarf and a clown suit while skiing down the interstate after kissing a llama in the town of Koosharem, Utah."

While a lot of the fun came from the show being totally improvised, what made it even better was wondering what was going to happen next.

And they really set the show apart by refusing to fall back on foul language for easy laughs.

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com