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Show:		6.0
Picture:		5.0
Sound:		6.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	Arthur Forrest • Bruce Gowers • Ron De Moraes
Writer(s):	Mark Leveson, Dan Patterson
Starring:	Brad Sherwood • Colin Mochrie • Greg Proops • Laura Hall • Linda Taylor • Ryan Stiles • Wayne Brady
Genre:	Comedy
Release Date:	June 09, 2009

List Price:	DVD - $24.98
Amazon:

No matter what else I may ever see him in, I will never be able to look at Wayne Brady and see anyone other than the man in the Dave Chappelle skit who sells drugs, runs a prostitution ring, and then defiantly screams, “I’m Wayne Brady, bitch” after shooting Dave Chappelle in the legs. That persona was, of course, a semi-retaliation against his reputation as a family friendly inoffensive black comedian, a reputation that he largely got by working on this show. Now, it seems that the entire show is trying to expand beyond its ‘family-friendly’ reputation with the release of this ‘uncensored’ DVD set, which collects ten episodes of the original series featuring material not included in the original broadcast.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Whose Line Is It Anyway? is an improvisational comedy show hosted and moderated by Drew Carey and featuring comedians Wayne Brady, Greg Proops, Laura Hall, Ryan Stiles, Linda Taylor, and Brad Sherwood. Though the show is formatted like a game show, with various activities at the center of the show, there are no real prizes given nor winners announced. There’s just sort of game after game until the show runs out its 22-minute time slot. Some of these games are funnier than others, but even when they don’t hit their mark, it’s at least more engaging to watch comedians test their mental dexterity and skill against each other than to just watch a failed joke sit there on the screen and die for five minutes. And for the most part, these guys are pretty good. Brady, as mentioned, is a standout (he never seems to be at a loss for words, even during games like ‘Hoedown’, in which one has to improvise a song), and Colin Mochrie plays off his boring, balding guy schtick well. The presence of some well-chosen guests (David Hasselhoff and Florence Henderson in particular) also enlivens things a little bit. The whole thing isn’t Second City, since most of the politically and sexually natured jokes that tend to come from being put on the spot are innocuous when present at all.

Which is what makes the premise of this whole set feel so strange. The word ‘uncensored’ is stamped across the front in the same kind of lettering that one would expect when seeing the word ‘rejected’ or ‘defective’. There are more warnings about the show’s content at the beginning of the disc than anything I’ve seen since Faces of Death, which makes you wonder who exactly this set is for. The fans of Whose Line Is It Anyway? that I know probably would be put off by the ‘uncensored’ tag, while most other hardcore improv people who would normally be drawn to something ‘uncensored’ probably wouldn’t be caught dead watching anything with Drew Carey in it. Plus, there’s nothing all that bad in here. Maybe a few things that would normally be blurred out on television (I caught a middle finger), but nothing that you’d have to go to confession over.

Which isn’t to say that the show isn’t funny. I laughed. Not real hard and not real long, but I did laugh, which is probably what they were going for here, in which case, mission accomplished.

DVD Bonus Features

The second disc also contains a small featurette The Best of Whose Line Is It Anyway, hosted by a tuxedo-clad Drew Carey, in which he reviews a number of individual scenes from the show for about forty-five minutes. It’s basically more of the same, but if you haven’t had enough after watching ten whole episodes, it’ll cap it off nicely.